Sold, Sight Unseen
by quothme
Summary: The odds of him dialing her phone number are 3,720 to 1. Yet he does. Their chance conversation leads to something more. Something silly, then serious and a little scary. But in a good way. AU
1. Chapter 1

**------------| Sold, Sight Unseen |------------**

* * *

**Summary:** The odds of him dialing her phone number are 3,720 to 1. But he does. Their chance conversation leads to something more. Something silly, then serious and a little scary. But in a good way. AU

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Twilight; it owns me. I also don't own anything else publically recognizable in this story (_e.g_., Superman or the two Stars, Trek and Wars).

**Note:** Because of the short, punchy style, this story will probably look best on your screen in 1/2 view.

* * *

* * * * * *

Like many love stories, this one starts unexpectedly. Unlike many love stories, this one starts with a phone call.

I've just gotten home from work and am shedding all of Work Bella's accessories to the floor as I make my way back to the bedroom.

I kick off my heels in the foyer. I set my laptop down on the ten-person dining room table. I drop my burnished silver purse into the wingback chair next to the bed. More Work Bella accessories spill out of my purse, but I don't stop to clean them up.

Already, I feel ten pounds lighter. My job is fast-paced and stressful. I hold the fate of a team in my hands. I don't always like the weight of that fate. I don't always like feeling like Work Bella.

For that matter, I don't always _like_ Work Bella.

Sometimes, it's nice to be just Bella.

I could watch TV. I could make some food. I could take a hot, strawberry-scented bubble bath in my jetted garden tub.

Instead, I fall face-first into my downy white comforter. I luxuriate in the feel of the softness and the weight of my legs hanging off the edge of the bed, an impromptu stretch of my aching calves.

Right then, of course, my cell phone rings.

I'm comfortable, and it's somewhere behind me, out of reach, so I decide to let it ring. I remain, immobile, in the center of the king-sized bed. As always, it makes me feel small. Even the sound of the ringtone echoing through empty halls makes me feel alone.

The phone rings only once. It cuts off right in the middle of the next ring.

Odd.

Telemarketers usually let it ring at least three times. Someone from work would have let it ring until the voice mail picked up. I'm not expecting a call from anyone else.

I army-crawl myself around on my bed until I can see my phone.

It's on the floor; it was one of the accessories that had spilled out of my purse in my haste to shed the day like a snakeskin.

Only vaguely curious, I poke the phone with a nylon-encased toe until I can see the screen from my vantage point on the bed.

It's currently lit up with the words, _Unknown caller_. As I watch, the screen fades to black.

Probably a telemarketer.

Nevertheless, I expend the energy necessary to pick up the phone. I flip it open to get more details, like maybe the area code.

_Number blocked_.

Definitely a telemarketer.

But why the single ring?

I rub the Call button lightly with my finger, debating.

What the heck, I could use a good survey right now. It's not as though I have anything else to do.

I hit Call.

And you never know; maybe it wasn't a telemarketer.

For some reason, that first ring causes my heart to jump into my throat.

I let the phone ring twice, three times, four. I expect an answering service to pick up, but none does. Five, six, seven.

Definitely not a telemarketer.

Eight.

I'm just about to hang up.

Nine.

I pull the phone away from my ear, and my thumb is on the End button.

I've resigned myself to yet another evening alone.

"Hello?" a small, tinny voice says from my hand.

I whip the phone back to my ear, but I don't know what to say.

"Hello?" the voice says again, and this time I can tell that it's male.

Definitely not a telemarketer.

"Uh, hi," I say.

"Who's this?" the male voice says. Oddly, the voice sounds almost as nervous as I feel.

"This is…the person whose phone you just called."

"Oh," he says.

"Any particular reason you were calling my phone?"

"Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I…had the wrong number."

"Oh," I say.

Worse than a telemarketer, then—someone who hadn't even meant to call me at all.

My life rocks.

Hard.

"Any particular reason you called back?" the guy asks.

Good question. I feel all kinds of stupid.

So I lie.

"I was…just expecting a call from someone. Thought you might be him."

"Oh. Sorry I'm not him…?" The guy chuckles.

Bless him, he's playing along. Most people would have said "Okay then" and wished me a good day.

But not this guy.

I like him.

On a whim, I decide to run with this. I did call him back, after all.

I blurt out, "Do you have some time to talk?"

He pauses for a moment. "Yeah, I have some time to kill."

I suck in a breath. I can't believe I'm actually doing this. "I realize this is completely weird."

"Kinda."

"We don't know each other."

"No."

"But could we just talk?"

"I'm sorry…?"

"Like, have a conversation."

"I thought we were." I think I hear a chuckle.

"I mean, could we continue this conversation?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On whom I'm talking to. I'll introduce myself if you will."

"Okay," I say, feeling unexpectedly shy. "I'm…Beth."

I don't know why; this doesn't feel like a divulge-your-real-name type of moment.

"Drew," he says.

Hm, he doesn't sound like a Drew. I wonder if he thinks I sound like a Beth. The silence stretches on for a moment.

"So, Beth, what would you like to talk about?"

The anonymity of it all is making me feel bold. "I'd like to talk about you, actually."

"Me?" He seems surprised.

"Yeah. What do you do, Drew?"

He's silent for a moment, perhaps contemplating how much to tell me. Perhaps contemplating if I'm some type of psycho stalker.

"If you don't mind me asking," I add.

"I don't," he says quickly. "I was just…thinking about how bizarre this is."

My heart sinks. "That you're sitting here having a completely meaningless conversation with a total stranger?"

"Well…there is that." He chuckles again. I'm really starting to like the sound of his laugh. "But it's not all that. I wasn't completely honest with you earlier."

I frown. Our conversation hasn't been all that long. What could he possibly have not been honest about already?

"I didn't mis-dial. I actually dialed your number on purpose."

"Uh…what?" Now it's my turn to think that maybe he's the crazy psycho stalker. I sit up a little straighter on my bed.

"Well, not your number, exactly. I dialed a number at random. On purpose."

Um.

"Gosh, I probably sound crazy."

"The thought had crossed my mind," I tease him. Or, at least, I'm sorta teasing. "I was actually thinking about the probability of one bored person sitting around at home on a Thursday night happening to call another bored person sitting at home on a Thursday night."

"If you think about it," he says, "the probability is actually pretty good. I'll bet a lot of people are sitting home bored right now. Being bored is like…the American pastime."

Good to know that he's at least on the same continent.

"True," I say. "So why were you randomly calling numbers?"

He sighs and seems to come to some sort of decision.

"Well, like you said, I'm bored. I'm sitting here on a Thursday night watching TV, and this show comes on. The characters are betting each other that if a girl were to call any random guy and ask him to have sex with her, he would say yes."

He must have interpreted my surprised laugh as shock because he makes a strangled noise. "Oh crap. I didn't mean it that way. I mean, not about the sex…I was just thinking that it would be totally weird to just randomly call some number."

When I don't answer immediately, he plows on, "I'm not going to ask you to have sex with me, I swear."

His stumbling is cute. I wonder if he's blushing. I wonder what I would say if he did ask to have sex with me.

"I thought it was the girl who is supposed to call the guy and ask to have sex." It must be the anonymity thing again. I'm not usually this daring. Something about this whole situation has my adrenaline going.

He laughs, clearly relieved I'm not completely weirded out.

"Maybe we should just drop the whole sex thing," he says.

"At least until we know each other's full names," I deadpan.

He laughs again. I like the sound of his laugh even more than I do his chuckle. For some reason, neither one of us volunteers our full name. I think we both feel it. I don't know what this is, but I know it's not something we need to rush.

I have hours before anyone will need me.

He says, "Sorry about this, but I actually have to get going."

"Okay." I say.

Obviously, someone needs him.

"It was nice talking to you."

"If that's what you could call it."

We laugh.

There's a pause.

Then, "Can I call you again?" he asks.

My heart skips a beat. I know I should say no. I know this is completely crazy. But I look around at my lonely house and my lonely life. I don't even have a cat.

"Yes."

We hang up without saying goodbye.

* * * * * *

* * *

**Note:** My apologies if a Phoneward story has already been done. If it has, I haven't read it. I started writing this story as a time out from the drama of my other story, AiTIC. Unlike what I normally do in these types of situations, I'm not going to sit on this for months while I think about whether I like it or not. I'm going to share it. All 10 chapters of the story are complete; they're just going through beta now. I'll post them as they're ready, at least once a week. Probably more often because I'm impatient.

Thanks to the ever-lovely betas moonlightdreamer333 and CapriciousC.


	2. Chapter 2

**-| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |-**

* * *

The next day at work, I'm oddly distracted. I'm distracted by a five-minute conversation I had with a complete stranger. I'm distracted wondering if he's going to call me again tonight. Maybe he meant that he wanted to call me the same time next week. Or next month. Maybe he's reconsidered and won't be calling me again at all. The thought makes me feel decidedly unsettled.

I leave work early.

I never leave work early, but I figure that if I'm not really working, I shouldn't be at work.

By leaving early, I avoid an hour of traffic. Of course, this then means that I arrive home an hour earlier than usual. I have at least an hour to wait before he might call me again.

I don't know what to do with myself for that hour.

So I poke around on the internet. I take that hot, strawberry-scented bubble bath that I'd thought of yesterday. I shave my legs. I French-braid my hair. I floss my teeth.

In all this time, my phone doesn't leave my side.

At six o'clock on the nose, I'm sitting in the middle of my king-sized bed, focusing carefully on my phone like it's a Ouija board.

The analogy is apt; I almost jump out of my skin when the phone lights up.

_Unknown caller_.

I hope to goodness it's not really a telemarketer this time.

"Hello?" I answer, almost breathlessly.

"Beth?"

I blink until I remember that I'd told him yesterday that my name was Beth.

"Uh, yeah."

"Hey, this is Drew."

"I remember."

We're silent for a moment. I've thought about this phone conversation all day. Unfortunately, I hadn't really thought past the part where the phone rang.

"So how was your day?" he asks. So considerate. So polite.

"Long."

"Mine, too." His voice is tight, nervous.

We're silent for more moments. I wonder if his day had been long for the same reason that mine was. I wonder what my reason actually was.

"I wasn't sure if you'd want me to call back."

I've wanted to talk to him all day, but I'm not being much help here.

"I wanted you to call me back."

"Good."

Our conversation yesterday had been free and easy. Today, we are both struggling to recreate that feeling, a feeling of complete spontaneity and anonymity.

We're failing.

"What show were you watching yesterday?" I ask.

"I'm sorry…?"

"What show were you watching that inspired you to call me?"

He's silent for a second.

Then, "So I have to caveat this."

I laugh. "Is it that bad?"

"Yes. I was so bored I was watching a chick show. But it had Courteney Cox in it, at least."

"Were you watching _Dirt_?" I vaguely remember seeing her in some racy ads for a show with that name a while back.

"No, her newest project."

I blink. "Did _Dirt_ get cancelled?"

"Yeah."

Blink and you miss it, I guess.

"So what's this elusive and fully-caveated show called?"

"I'm embarrassed to even be thinking the name."

"Just spit it out."

"_Cougar Town_." I picture him hanging his head in shame.

"Is the show about Courteney as a 40 plus year-old cougar going after younger men?"

"Pretty much."

Is the fact that he finds a 40 plus year-old woman hot a good thing?

"But to clarify, I'm not in to cougars. I've just always liked Courteney Cox."

Good to know that he's younger than Courteney Cox. I'm about to ask him how old he is when I hear him take a breath.

"So I was thinking," he says. "If this _thing_ between us…whatever it is…is going to continue—and I must say that I hope it does—we're going to need some ground rules."

I'm a little distracted by him telling me that we have a _thing_. And that he wants this _thing_ to continue. "What do you propose?"

"No details."

I frown. "What do you mean?"

"I think we should agree to keep all the specific details of our lives vague, just in case one or both of us really is a crazy psycho stalker."

He's obviously put some thought into this. His consideration makes me smile.

I say, "I assume that if you actually are a crazy psycho stalker, you're probably outside watching me from my window as we speak."

"Good point."

I look up and validate that my curtains are pulled carefully across my window.

I say, "You don't happen to know what I'm wearing, do you?"

"Uh…would I tell you if I did?"

I laugh. "No, I guess not. What would you guess that I'm wearing, then?"

Whoops. There I go bringing up the potential risqué topic from yesterday, albeit innocently.

"Hm," he says in a silly tone. I envision him tapping a finger against his chin in an exaggerated gesture. "I can tell you what I _don't_ think you're wearing. Would that work?"

"Sure."

"No offense, but you don't seem like the pink silk pajama type."

I look down at my ratty old shirt and sweats. "I'm not."

But I do have a pink silk pajama set hanging in my closet. A gift I never wear. Is it odd that this stranger on the other end of the phone has intuited more about me in five minutes than a person who has known me my entire life?

Our comments about my appearance break the ice.

Drew spends the next several minutes throwing out outlandish guesses about what I could possibly be wearing.

"Flannel nightie?"

"Mickey Mouse boxers?"

"Granny panties?"

"Nothing?"

I laugh at that one. "You wish."

Eventually, I reveal my less than sexy choice of pajamas. Although I might have left out the descriptors of _ratty_ and _holes_.

"Alright," he says. "Now that the question of your attire has been sufficiently addressed, what say you, fair lady, to my proposition about ground rules?"

He sounds like an old-timey knight. I think it's his attempt at maintaining levity in a situation rapidly spiraling toward something else.

"I acquiesce to your demands, kind sir," I say, quite solemnly.

"Most excellent," he says, equally as solemnly.

"Now I think it's your turn to tell me what you're wearing."

* * *

Drew and I talk each night for the next two weeks.

I've come to look forward to our evening chats. Sometimes we talk for minutes, until one of us has to go. Sometimes, that person is me. More often, that person is him. Sometimes we talk for hours. We talk about nothing, and we talk about everything.

Well, not everything.

We both respect our ground rules. We don't drop too many hints about our age, location, or profession. We avoid identifying details that would allow the other person to track us down someday. We're still not convinced that the other person isn't a psycho stalker killer.

I find that it's liberating to talk to someone who (a) can't see you and (b) knows absolutely nothing about you. They don't second-guess, they don't judge, they don't criticize.

They just listen.

Or, at least, Drew listens.

I don't know if this whole thing—whatever it is—would be quite the same if I were talking to anyone else.

Each day, when it's time for us to go, we continue not saying goodbye.

Almost like we don't want to.

* * *

A few more days of talking, and I'm getting a little tired of being called _Beth_. Drew seems to delight in saying my name.

"So."

"Yes, Beth?"

"I have to be honest with you," I say.

"Is there something you'd like to confess, Beth?" He's in a rare mood today.

"Yes."

"Is this the part where you tell me you're actually a dude?"

I laugh. His sense of humor continues to surprise me. "No. I just wasn't exactly honest with you…about something."

"What thing?" He seems tense all of a sudden.

"Well." I hesitate. "My name."

"Your name?" He lets out a breath.

"Yeah."

"As in, your name is not really Beth?"

"Right."

"Huh," he says.

I cringe, feeling stupid. "Are you mad?"

"No," he says, almost flippantly.

"Why not?"

"Because I could never really see you as a Beth."

"Oh."

"And my name is not really Drew, either."

He sounds smug.

"You lied to me!" I say in mock outrage.

"To be fair, you lied to me first."

"Yeah, but you didn't know that."

"Actually, I did."

He sounds even more smug.

"How could you tell I was lying after speaking to me for only five minutes? Over the phone, no less?"

"I don't know. I think it was all in the pause. You paused for a second before you said your name. People tend to pause before they lie. Because good people, like you, are usually uncomfortable with the lie."

I'm floored by his insight. I'm also floored by the fact that he thinks I'm a good person.

"Plus, I didn't really want to give you my real name, either, albeit for an entirely different reason."

"Which is?"

"It's a funny name. My parents are sort of old-fashioned."

"You do realize that you're going to have to tell me your real name now."

"Only after you tell me yours."

"Spill it, _Drew_."

"You first, _Beth_. This was your confession, remember?"

"I have a better idea."

"Which is?"

"Let's play a game." I'm bored. I'm sitting here in an empty house. I don't want today's conversation to end.

"A name game?" He's catching on. We play lots of games.

"Yes. If you had to choose a name for me based on what you know so far, what would it be?" For some reason, I'm curious to hear what he'll come up with.

He plays along. "Your name begins with a B, right?"

I'm floored again. "How did you know?"

"Because I figure you gave me a name similar enough to your own that you wouldn't feel as bad about lying."

"You're right." He's nothing if not a sharp cookie.

"Okay, let's see." He thinks for a second. "Girl names beginning with a B."

He thinks some more.

"I don't see you as a Betty or a Brittany."

He pauses.

"Are you a Bertha?"

"What?" I mock-screech. "Not Betty or Brittany, but you go with Bertha? Do you think I sound like a cow?"

He snickers. "I'm kidding."

He pauses.

"Actually, I think you sound like bells."

A tingle travels up my spine.

"I can't believe it."

"What?"

"My dad calls me Bells."

"Holy cow!" he says, excited. "Did I just guess your name?"

"Not quite," I say. "But close. Bells is my nickname. Can you guess my real name now?"

"I'm sure I can." He's confident.

"Well?"

"Bellarina."

"Nope."

"Bellatrix."

"Ha."

"Don't tell me you were named after B'Elanna."

"Who's B'Elanna?"

"I guess that's a no. She was the half-Klingon on Star Trek Voyager." Duh, his tone is saying. "Is that name not ringing any bells?"

"So punny," I say dryly.

He snickers again, then seems to grow serious.

"Isabella."

The sound of his voice saying my name causes that tingle up my spine to graduate to an all-out lightening storm.

"Yes," I say simply.

"Then you lied to _me_."

"About what?"

"Your name doesn't start with a B."

"I go by Bella."

"And your dad calls you Bells."

"Right."

"I think I'd still like to call you B'Elanna."

I laugh. "I really don't see myself as even partially a Lana. Do you ever watch _Smallville_?"

"Good point." Lana wasn't exactly everyone's favorite character on that show. I'm surprised he knows that.

We laugh together.

"So," I say.

"Yes, Bella?"

He's having a little too much fun rubbing it in my face that he knows my name. Which brings me to my next point.

"You haven't yet told me your real name."

"That's because you have to guess."

"Shoot. Something tells me your name doesn't start with a D."

His turn to be surprised. "Why do you say that?"

"Because you didn't even bat a metaphorical eye when you told me your fake name. Therefore, I sense that you went all kinds of crazy when picking it out."

"Well, not entirely."

"Explain."

"Andrew Cloodle is my alter-ego. I shortened it to Drew for you."

"Your alter-ego's last name rhymes with noodle?"

"Well, yes." He seems uncomfortable.

"You have an alter-ego?"

He laughs. "Yes."

"What do you use said alter ego for?"

"I use him whenever I feel like dressing up in spandex and running around the house," he deadpans.

"Oh. I guess I missed the part earlier about you being crazy."

He laughs again. For some reason, he seems delighted.

I know how he feels.

I haven't bantered like this with someone in…ever.

"So you actually use this alter ego to…" I prompt.

"To goof off. I actually created him to play World of Warcraft."

"I think I've heard of it."

At my less than positive response, he quickly amends. "But that was several years ago, during college. Or maybe high school."

So he was in college several years ago. Several usually means three to four. I stop guessing at his age when I realize that it really doesn't matter.

I smile. "Are you backpedalling in an attempt not to sound like a complete geek?"

"Is it working?"

"Not really. You've brought up Star Trek and World of Warcraft in the space of five minutes."

"That's because I rock."

"So you're a geek and proud of it?"

"Pretty much."

"What did you say your name was again?" I can't really talk geek, so I figure we need to get back to the point of this whole conversation. If it even has one. That is part of the fun.

"I didn't. You're supposed to guess."

"Okay." I think back to the clues I have so far. Which are none. "All I know is that your name doesn't start with a D or an A."

"That's fine."

"No, it's not. You knew my name started with a B."

"Only because you told me." I just know that, wherever he is, he's smirking.

"Not gonna take pity on me here, are you?"

"Nope."

"Jerk."

"Good guess, but that's not my name."

I blow a raspberry at him.

"Did you just blow a raspberry at me?"

"Yep."

"Huh. I would like to have seen that." His voice is oddly serious.

I look down at the clock and realize that we've been talking for nearly two hours.

"Holy crow. We've been talking for nearly two hours!"

"I noticed," he says dryly.

"And I still haven't figured out your name."

"Well, at least you know that it's not Jerk."

"I don't know; that might have to be your nick name."

"You call me Jerk, I call you B'Elanna." His voice contains too much laughter to be a threat.

"I _will_ figure out your real name."

"I believe you…" his voice trails off, as if he's distracted, "…but it's going to have to be tomorrow. I gotta run."

"Okay."

We hang up.

We're good like that. If one of us has to run, we go, no questions asked.

* * *

Despite its length, I feel unsettled about that conversation. It's odd to know that you've been talking to a guy for over two weeks whose name is not really Drew.

I wonder if there's a way for me to figure out his name without him knowing about it.

I grab my laptop and pull up my trusty sidekick, Google. On a hunch, I type in "Andrew Cloodle."

Unfortunately, Google doesn't know any Andrew Cloodles. So I try alternate spellings for the last name. He hadn't spelled it out for me; maybe it wasn't actually spelled like "noodle." Other words that could rhyme with noodle but could be spelled differently include Cluedle, Cludle, and Cludel.

Bingo. An Andrew Cludel has a Facebook profile.

I click the link and see that the profile picture is some type of animated avatar, what I can only assume is a sorcerer. He has a white beard and long, pointy ears. I would almost bet money that this is one of the characters from that Warcraft game Drew had mentioned.

I start laughing. I laugh because the profile shows that it's been active for only a short while—obviously, he's been playing more recently than high school, as he'd claimed. I laugh because the avatar is a sorcerer, but it's wearing a bikini. And I laugh because I have just gotten the best idea ever.

With a ridiculously large grin on my face, I click the button to sign up for a new Facebook account.


	3. Chapter 3

**------------| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

"Was it purely a coincidence that I received a Facebook invite from a B'Elanna Torres last night?"

This is the first thing that not-Drew says to me the following evening, as soon as I answer the phone.

"I must confess, I really liked the pictures of your little avatar dressed in a bikini."

He laughs, embarrassed. "Oh, I had forgotten about those. I created that Facebook profile as a joke. My entire WoW team did, actually. We amused ourselves by dressing up our avatars in ridiculous costumes."

So that would explain his five little avatar-looking friends. And their ridiculous costumes.

"What's a WoW team?"

"Geek-speak for the people who play 'World of Warcraft' with me."

"And you said _amused_ like you hadn't just posted that bikini picture like a month ago."

He laughs even harder. "You really did do your homework."

"I'm nothing if not thorough. Did you like the profile picture I chose?"

He's laughing so hard he almost can't talk.

"That picture…got my attention." He's almost snorting.

Although there had been plenty of perfectly appropriate pictures of B'Elanna to choose from, I'd found the perfectly inappropriate one. It was an obviously Photoshopped picture of B'Elanna's face on a bikini-clad body.

"I figured I couldn't go wrong with a girl in a bikini. In regards to getting your attention, of course. Plus, it was in keeping with your theme."

"You…are a genius?"

"If I were a genius, I would have figured out your real name by now. That was actually my goal in tracking you down on Facebook."

Facebook fail.

His chuckles are winding down, although I wouldn't doubt that he still has B'Elanna on the brain.

He says, "I'm feeling magnanimous today. I'll give you a clue."

"Wow. My fiendish Facebook plan worked even better than I'd expected."

"My name starts with—"

"Wait, don't tell me. Your name starts with a J, right?"

"No," he says, and my spirits drop, just a tiny little bit. "Why do you say that?" He's curious.

I may have inspected his fake Facebook profile a little too closely last night. I thought I was being sneaky. One of his five little avatar friends wasn't an avatar at all. It was someone with blonde hair and blue eyes and the name Jasper Whitlock.

It's a strange name, but I thought that it just might be Drew's real name. After all, he'd said that his name was old-fashioned and that I would laugh.

"I saw that one of your friends was named Jasper, and I laughed."

Somehow, I can't picture him as a _Jasper_ any more than I can a _Drew_.

"Oh," he says. Then, "_Oh_." Like he finally understands what I'm getting at. "Jasper's friends with my WoW avatar?"

"Yeah."

"I had forgotten about that." His laugh is more subdued than before.

I think I know what he's feeling—real life is intruding on our little bubble here for the first time. It's only a small leap from knowing who one of his real friends on Facebook is to finding out who he really is. If he has a Facebook profile for his WoW avatar, I would guess that he has one for himself. I would also guess that he and Jasper are friends.

I don't think too hard about that. Not yet, at least.

"If your name is not Jasper, then I'm going to need that clue after all."

I sound like a teenager. This whole thing has made me feel like a teenager again. Is that so wrong? I'm not sure. What started out as an innocent phone call to a stranger and some harmless banter has turned into something else. Something scarier. Because I'm feeling all these things, things that I haven't felt in a long time.

Right now, I'm feeling like I need to know his name.

"My name starts with an E," he says.

Hm, an old-fashioned name starting with an E.

"Evan, Edmund, Edgar, Earl, Elliot, Elmo, Eugene."

He's shocked. "You just rattled off like five old-fashioned names that start with an E."

"Seven, actually. I've always been good with words." I'm smug.

"Unfortunately for you, my name was not in that list." He's even more smug.

Suck it.

"Then I guess your name must be Ebenezer."

"Nope."

"Edison?"

"I'm smart, but not that smart."

"Eeyore?"

"Did you just call me a donkey?"

"Well, you did call me a cow, so…"

He snickers at a memory of Bertha.

"No. My name is not Eeyore."

"Elijah?"

He's silent.

Then, "How in the world are you rattling off all these old-fashioned E names?"

"I have a confession to make."

"You've been making a lot of those recently."

"I must confess—Google is a genius."

"Ah." He laughs. "You're reading from a list of common boy's names starting with E, and you can't seem to find mine?"

"You didn't say that it was a common name," I accuse.

"I said that it was old-fashioned and funny. I didn't say that it wasn't common."

That narrows it down. The most common name on the list I'm looking at is some variation of…

"Is your name Edward?"

"Why yes, it is."

"Hi, Edward."

"Hi, Bella."

For some reason, I'm both pleased and freaked by our proper introduction. I like knowing his real name, but knowing his real name has also made this more real. I wonder if he felt the same when he learned my name.

"Did you know that the name Edward means 'wealthy guardian'?"

"I did."

"Are you wealthy, Edward?"

"I…do alright." A cryptically uncomfortable answer. Probably means he's loaded. But of course, I don't pry. It's against the rules.

"Are you a guardian, Edward?"

"Not really."

"Do you go by Ed?"

"No."

"Ted?"

"No."

"Eddie."

"Absolutely not."

"You know, if you went by Eddie, your name would then mean 'wealth protector.'"

"Ha, that's a little more accurate. But not a good enough reason to go by Eddie."

I wonder if he's in banking.

"Alright, Edward."

I like saying his name. He seems like an Edward. Somehow, I don't think our conversations would have gone the same if he'd been a Ben or a Bob or a Chester.

I say, "Did you know that if you reversed your name, you would almost get 'drawed.'"

"Actually, I do know that." He's sheepish.

A sneaking suspicion hits me. "_That's_ where you got _Drew_ from, isn't it?"

"Yeah. You're, um, freakishly good at this word stuff, despite your reliance on Google."

"Hey, I'm not the one who flipped my first name to create an avatar for myself."

I wonder where the last name Cludel had come from. Ledulc was a terrible last name. Best not press the issue. Against the rules and all that.

"Well, you're the first person who ever figured it out without me having to explain," he says.

"Well."

If we'd been in the same room, we would be sitting there smiling at each other stupidly. Instead, we sit and say nothing into our phones. I'm smiling stupidly. I don't know about him.

Just as I'm about to ask him another question, I hear a key in my front door.

I hear someone say, "Bella, I'm home!"

"On that note," I say, "I've gotta go."

And I hang up.

**

* * *

**

Author's note:

The picture of B'Elanna in a bikini is on my profile. And I did actually create a Facebook profile for Andrew Cludel. If there ever is a real Andrew Cludel, I hope he doesn't mind. Funny story: I've been trying to befriend a Jasper Whitlock and a B'Elanna Torres on Facebook so that, you know, Andrew's profile actually looks like how I've described it here. My friend requests go like so: "Hi, I created this imaginary profile for a fanfic I'm writing in which I need this profile to be frends with a hot-looking Jasper Whitlock and a B'Elanna in a bikini. This is legit. I swear."

Needless to say, I'm having a hard time getting people to accept my friend requests. :)


	4. Chapter 4

**------------| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

Mike Newton and I have known each other since we were in diapers. We've been dating since the twelfth grade. And we've been living together for nearly four years now. After college, I moved in to a house he bought north of the city.

He rarely comes home on time. His job is even more stressful than mine. And he often has to take clients out to dinner, as his thickening waistline and jowls can attest to. When I started dating him, Mike was a lean, mean quarterback machine. Now, he's more of a jovial roly poly.

I wonder if Edward heard Mike's voice.

I don't have to wonder for long.

"Who was that yesterday?" Edward asks, his first question out of the gate the following evening.

"My boyfriend," I say, a little uncomfortably. We hadn't agreed not to discuss our families or relationships as part of our ground rules, but the topic hasn't exactly come up, either.

"He sounded nice. Although a bit peeved," Edward says, and I can tell he's teasing. He didn't even miss a beat at the new info about my availability.

"He's starting to notice that I'm spending more time talking to you than to him," I tease him right back.

Immediately, Edward seems worried. "I'm sorry to be monopolizing so much of your time."

"It's fine. Actually, Mike's job keeps him very busy."

And actually, Mike has no idea that I've been talking on the phone with a complete stranger. He's merely noticed that dinner is not ready for him as often as it used to be. I've been ordering take-out.

"What does he do?"

"He's a VP of Sales." The youngest in company history, actually. Of course, it helps that his daddy owns the company.

"Well, I can certainly understand how I would feel if my girlfriend were talking to another guy every time I came home from work."

Unexpectedly, my stomach clenches at the thought of Edward having a girlfriend. Perhaps this topic has not come up before because we both have something to hide.

Oddly, I can't seem to bring myself to ask him the obvious question. So I ask him other questions instead.

"What's your favorite color?"

What if he has a wife?

"Uh…probably blue."

What if he has kids?

"Boxers or briefs?"

What if he's really gay?

"Boxers."

We're on a roll, so I decide to ask him the question I'd wanted to all along.

"Do you have a girlfriend?"

He laughs. "That's the question you wanted to ask me in the first place, isn't it?"

"Yes." I feel sheepish.

"I did have a girlfriend," he answers slowly. "But we broke up."

"I'm sorry," I say, although his answer makes me feel anything but sorry. But I try to put myself in his shoes. I've never been through a bad break-up before. Mike and I had been high school sweethearts, and although we'd had minor disagreements, I've never really felt strongly enough about anything he's done to break up with him. He's steady and loyal, everything that a good partner is supposed to be.

In a word, he's boring.

"Bad break-up?" I ask.

He hesitates for a second. "Bad enough. But it could have been worse."

"Who did the breaking?"

"I broke up with her, actually. That's why it could have been worse."

"Do you mind me asking why?"

He hesitates again. "No, I don't mind. I think we've established that you can ask me anything you want. Provided you don't break any of the rules."

"If I ask something too personal, just tell me."

"Same goes for me."

"So…why did you break up with her?"

"I realized that she wasn't the right person for me. We'd been dating for a while, and I'd thought for a long time that she was the one. But then I realized…she's not."

"Hm," I say.

"What, was that not what you expected?"

"Not exactly."

"Did you expect a lurid tale full of cheating and backstabbing?"

"Well, yeah. Something along the lines of 'she got drunk and cheated on me with my best friend, who just so happens is also a woman.'"

Edward laughs one of his deep belly laughs. "Sorry…I'm just picturing Tanya as a lesbian whore. You never know; it could happen."

Tanya. His ex-girlfriend's name is Tanya.

More importantly, Edward is single.

I ask more questions about Tanya. A lot of questions, actually.

I find out where Edward and Tanya met (during a Phys Ed class in college), what Tanya looks like (she's hot), and what she does for a living (VP of Marketing).

Oh joy. If Tanya worked at my company, she'd be my boss.

The thought depresses me.

"You're asking an awful lot of questions about my ex," Edward says dryly. I know by now that this is his way of telling me that he's a little uncomfortable.

I wonder why. But I don't ask.

"Well, I can't ask these types of questions about you, but these questions are technically half about you so…it's a win win."

"You're all about cheating on our rules, aren't you?"

"I like to bend rules, yes."

But I'm not about to tell him how badly I want to bend our rules.

Instead, I say, "So I have to be honest here. I'm wondering what you look like. Your friend Jasper is hot."

Edward laughs. "He is, isn't he? His Facebook picture doesn't really even do him justice."

If he's comfortable calling another guy hot, that probably means that Edward ain't too shabby himself.

Is it weird that I'm psychoanalyzing everything Edward says?

"Where's Jasper from?" I ask.

Even as I ask the question, I know that I'm skirting our rules a little. If Jasper and Edward grew up together, then Edward probably won't want to answer this question.

But Edward doesn't even hesitate. "Texas."

I assume this means that Edward is neither from nor in Texas.

"They do know how to grow them in Texas."

He laughs again.

"So I have to be honest with you," Edward says. "This might sound weird, but…I actually don't want us to exchange pictures."

I feel a pinprick of…what? Disappointment? No, I think it's hurt.

"Are you afraid I'm abysmally ugly?" It's a joke, but I'm not exactly joking.

"I know you're not ugly."

"How do you know that?"

"Because no one with such a beautiful soul could ever be ugly."

Just like that, our conversation goes from teasing to confusing. Confusing because I can't understand how I can possibly have such strong feelings for someone after only talking to him on the phone for over a month.

Because just like that, Edward has made me feel more beautiful than Mike ever has.

He continues, "I just…I have this idea of you in my head. For some reason, I don't want to mess with that."

"I can understand that," I say. Because I can. A picture of a person can't always do them justice. Just like Jasper's picture. Pictures can create a certain mood. Pictures can be misleading.

I like the phone Edward just fine.

Okay fine.

I more than like the phone Edward.


	5. Chapter 5

**------------| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

Out of the blue, my company decides to send me overseas for a week to present some training at our branch in India. It's a big deal for me, as I've never been out of the country before. And India isn't exactly the most developed of places to be sent to.

I talk to Edward more often the week before I'm supposed to leave to distract myself from the stress of preparing for the trip.

For the first time, I call him in the middle of the day, when I'm on lunch break. I hope he is, too. Although I can't be positive, I'm pretty sure at this point that we're in the same time zone.

After only a few more rings than normal, Edward answers with a breathless, "Hey Bella."

"Why are you breathing hard?"

"You miss nothing."

"True." It helps that I've been focusing very intently on our conversations in my new role as a Psychoanalyst.

"I'm breathing hard because I high-tailed it out of my office."

"Where did you high-tail it to?"

"The stairwell."

"Ah, that would explain the weird echo that I'm hearing."

"Yeah. So what's up?" For the first time, I realize that he sounds a little worried. Of course, I've never called him in the middle of the day before. And I can't actually tell if he's on his lunch break or not. Psychoanalyst fail.

"It's nothing, actually. I just wanted to hear your voice."

As the words slip out, I feel so amazingly stupid. This whole thing is stupid. I'm letting the stress of this whole India thing get to me. Mike hasn't been particularly supportive, and I might be using Edward as a crutch because I know he's sweet and will let me.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I shouldn't be intruding on your work day."

"No, it's okay. I needed a break." He pauses. "I'm always glad to hear your voice."

We'd never admitted that to each other before.

"I'm having a craptastic day, actually," I admit.

"I'm sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do?"

I wish there were something he could do.

"Oh…" I say, casting around for something. "I could use a foot massage right about now."

He laughs, and it's one of his nervous laughs. Then I realize what I've said. My mental filter is…not filtering.

I'm opening my mouth to apologize, and Edward says something I never in a million years would have expected.

"Well, how about I give you a foot massage?"

Um.

"Come again?"

"A virtual one, of course. You know, like a phone massage?"

I almost drop my phone. He might as well have asked me to have phone sex.

"Bella? You still there?" His voice is low, almost husky.

"Yeah, I'm here," I say quietly.

"Did I freak you out?" He laughs his nervous laugh again.

"No," I lie. "I'm just thinking about logistics here."

I'm sitting in my private office with my door closed, but there is a window next to the door that people tend to knock on often. I can't sit here and get a virtual foot massage with the chance of someone seeing.

It wouldn't be professional.

So I decide to take a card out of Edward's deck.

"Hold on. I'm going to the stairwell."

Edward's breath hitches.

We're really going to do this.

Although I have no idea what _this_ really is.

I'm walking quickly through the rows of cubes, avoiding eye contact, but keeping my head high. Every so often, I hum into the phone to give myself an excuse to still have it up to my ear.

Edward waits quietly, although I can hear his breathing.

I reach the stairwell.

"Okay, I'm here."

"I see what you mean about the echo," he says.

"Yeah."

We're quiet.

I say, "So how does this whole thing work?"

"Would you believe me if I told you I've never given a virtual foot massage before?"

"I would. I haven't received one before, either."

"Then we're in uncharted territory here."

In more ways than one.

We're quiet.

I remain standing awkwardly in the deserted stairwell.

"Okay," Edward says, expelling a breath.

This is it.

He's taking the reins.

"I need you to sit down on the stairs and get comfortable."

"Okay," I say, and do just that. Thankfully, I'm wearing slacks today and not one of my pencil skirts. "I'm sitting and am comfortable."

I notice that he doesn't ask what I'm wearing, and I think I can understand why.

"Take off your right shoe."

I unbuckle my pump and slip out of it. Already, my foot feels better.

"No socks?"

"No."

Edward's breath hitches.

"Okay," he says. "If I were there right now, I would pull your foot into my lap. I would start by massaging the balls of your foot with my thumbs. Can you do that?"

"Yes." As I use my own thumbs to massage the balls of my foot, I imagine my thumbs are his.

My breath hitches.

"Then I would rub my thumb along the underside of your arch, applying just enough pressure for you to feel it."

My thumb does exactly as he says.

"Now I grip your heel and gently squeeze."

I gasp.

"Then I rub small circles around your ankle," he says.

"Up your ankles higher," he says.

"And up the backs of your calves, just so they don't feel left out."

Some of my other body parts are feeling very, very left out. Oddly, the thought of someone happening to wander into the stairwell makes this all the more arousing.

"Now back to your feet, to your five little toes."

Is it weird that I love the sound of him talking about my little toes?

"I pull apart each toe, checking to make sure that each one is not bruised, pulling gently on each one, until I get to the pinky toe."

Edward's voice is very, very low.

"And then I would…um…kiss the pinky toe."

I stifle a moan.

"Then I press your whole foot in between my two hands, pressing and rotating slightly to make sure everything is loose.

"I put your foot back down against the cool of the stairs."

My skin is fire; the concrete of the stairs is ice.

We sit for a second.

Then he says, "And we start on the next one."

Dear Lord.

The cycle repeats.

When he's finished, when both of my feet have been thoroughly touched, each pinky toe kissed, and each foot laid gently back on the concrete, we sit still.

We're quiet.

My body is heavy, is fairly flowing down the stairs.

"Edward?" I'm breathing a little too hard.

"Yeah." He's breathing a little too hard.

"That was the best foot massage I've ever received."

He's quiet.

"Thank you," I say because there's nothing else I can say.

"You're very welcome."

I think, just for one second, that he's about to say something else.

He says, "I hope you have a good rest of the day."

That's not what I thought he was going to say.

We hang up without saying goodbye.

* * *

I'm on a five-hour flight from SeaTac to New York, and all I can think about is that foot massage. All I can think about is that I want so badly to get to my hotel in India so that I can call Edward. That foot massage was easily in the top ten of the most erotic experiences in my life.

Maybe top five.

I wonder if we can do it again.

I wonder if we can do…other things.

It's really, really hard to sit still on a five-hour flight when you're thinking about doing…other things.

But I make it.

And then I make it through the follow-on sixteen-hour flight all the way to India.

Thoughts of Edward get me through the baggage claim and through customs and through a rather insane taxi ride that I'm almost positive I'm ridiculously overcharged for.

When I settle into my hotel room, I quickly do the math and realize that, although it's the middle of the night for me, it's early morning in the U.S.

Edward will be awake.

So I go to call him.

But I can't.

Because my phone is missing.

It's not in my carry-on. It's not in the pocket of my coat or jeans. It's not in my luggage. It's not anywhere on the floor or under the bed or in the bathroom.

My phone is missing.

Correction, my phone has been stolen.

The last time I remember seeing it is when I put it in my carry-on right before it went through the x-ray machine at the Indian airport.

The phone must have been taken at some point before or after its trip down the little conveyor belt.

Everyone had warned me that electronics tend to get stolen in India, which is why I'd been extra careful about keeping everything out of sight, the pockets of my carryon fully zipped up.

But, as my carry-on had gone through the x-ray machine, I'd been forced to stand behind a curtain while a lady security officer frisked me.

The carry-on had been out of my sight for less than a minute.

In that minute my phone had, most certainly, been stolen.

I freak out.

I've been travelling for twenty-four hours straight. I'm in a foreign country where the few people I've tried to speak English to haven't been able to understand what I'm saying. I've been short-changed and over-charged and generally regarded as stupid because of my white skin. I'm about to spend the next five days standing up in front of a group of people when I absolutely hate giving oral presentations.

And now I can't even talk to Edward.

My freak out involves lots of crying and pounding of my bed.

I finally turn on the television and watch Indian music videos (which involve lots of dancing) until I'm able to drift into sleep.

The next morning, I square my shoulders and deliver the heck out of that training. I have internet access at work, so I'm able to send e-mails to Mike, Renee, and Charlie to let them know that I'd arrived safely.

But I can't figure out a way to let Edward know why he won't be hearing from me in over a week.

In losing my cell phone, I've also lost his cell phone number. I'd never even tried to find out what his phone number actually was. I'd just saved him as an Unknown Caller in my contact list. If I'd ever looked at his number, I would have been breaking our rules. I would have been able to figure out where he lived (or at least the general area) from his area code.

So I haven't looked at his number.

I will gladly bet money that he's never looked at mine, either.

We're pretty anal about our rules.

And now our rules have completely bitten us in the butt.

In a flash of brilliance, I decide to log in to my B'Elanna Torres Facebook account so that I can at least post a message on Andrew Cludel's wall.

Imagine my surprise when Facebook is on the list of blocked Internet sites here.

"Too many people were goofing off during work," the IT guy tells me.

I wonder if he can make an exception for me. But I don't ask. I don't want to give the impression that I myself will also be Facebooking during work.

It's not professional.

So I continue delivering the heck out of my prepared training and I try very hard not to think about Edward.

I try not to think about what Edward is probably assuming.

The last conversation we'd had is the one in which he'd given me the foot massage.

I can only imagine what thoughts are going through his head the longer I don't call him back. He probably thinks that he completely freaked me out. He probably thinks that we're never going to talk again.

It's the longest week of my life.

My body has a difficult time adjusting to the twelve-hour time difference, the heat, the spicy food, the constant standing on my feet.

I try giving myself a foot massage back in my hotel room.

It's not the same.

**

* * *

**

Author's note:

An x-ray in India really did eat my cell phone. Stupid x-ray machines. 


	6. Chapter 6

**------------| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

My week in India does, at last, come to an end.

After a nearly unbearable twenty-four hours of travel (which somehow seems three times longer than those same twenty-four hours on the way to India), I at last step back onto Washington soil. Or at least Washington concrete.

Mike picks me up at the airport.

"Look at you," he says. "You look thinner. I like it."

I don't. I think I looked like a cadaver. I feel like a cadaver.

On the way home, Mike stops at an electronics store, as we'd discussed over e-mail, and I replace my cell phone. After a few hours of charging, it will be ready to go again.

I will be able to talk to Edward again.

"I don't know why you're in such a hurry to replace that," Mike says. "Might be nice not to get so many work calls, hm?"

I don't agree. I don't say anything.

When I step in to the front door of the house that Mike and I share, I look around, and everything looks amazingly clean and luxurious and American.

"Do you want me to order some pizza?"

"No," I say and wander back toward the bedroom.

I fall in to bed with my clothes on.

For the next two days, I'm dead to the world.

* * *

When I wake up, it's 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday. Stupid jet lag.

I look at the clock and try desperately to go back to sleep. But my body is telling me that it's time to get up.

So I do.

Mike is snoring softly in the bed next to me. I want to scream at someone that I should be asleep, but Mike looks peaceful, so I don't disturb him.

When I get up, I notice that Mike must have changed me into my pink silk pajamas. They're hot and itchy and bunched up in all the wrong places. I have those red lines criss-crossing all over my skin. They look like scratches.

I immediately go into the closet and change back into my sweats and t-shirt.

Then I grab my new cell phone and close the door to our bedroom on my way out.

After I get the phone plugged in and it finds service, I see that I have like a bazillion new messages. Okay, only about seven.

One for each day of the week I was gone.

They're all from an Unknown Caller.

The first one is dated over a week ago, the day I was on a plane.

I settle in on the couch and start to listen.

"Hey, it's Edward. I think this is the first time I've called that you haven't picked up your phone. Are you trying to tell me something?" Laughter. "I hope our virtual foot massage didn't send you running for the hills." Nervous chuckle. "But seriously, I was really hoping to talk to you tonight about something important. Give me a call back when you're available."

For some reason, the word "important" makes me feel hot all over. What can he possibly have to talk to me about that is important?

The next day, he called again.

"Hey, it's Edward again." His voice isn't as lighthearted this time. "Just checking in on ya. I still really need to talk to you. Call me."

Day three, another call.

"Hey, it's me." He almost sounds nervous. "I do hope you're not avoiding me. Sorry to seem paranoid, but I can't stop thinking about our last conversation. I hate to do this in a voicemail, but I wanted to tell you a little bit about what's been going on for me since we last talked. Tanya…has been riding me pretty hard about getting back together. We've had a lot of long heart-to-hearts about our future this week."

My own heart drops to my toes.

Of course it would be this particular week that Tanya makes a power play for Edward.

I can just picture Edward and Tanya lounging in some swanky VP of Marketing apartment, sitting close and drinking wine. She'd be wearing a demure yet alluring outfit in an attempt to be innocently seductive. She'd be running a perfectly manicured toe up his calf. I don't know why I imagine her as the perfect model type, but for some reason, I do.

"The reason why I'm telling you all this—"

Edward's voice is interrupted by the beep that signals the end of available message space. I fumble with the phone again, cursing my slowness with the new device. I hit the button to play my next voice mail message.

"Sorry about that; the machine cut me off." He pauses for a moment to gather his thoughts. I've never heard his voice so tight, so strained. "Bella, I told you that I broke up with Tanya. But I didn't tell you exactly why. I broke up with her a few weeks after we started talking on the phone."

My skin grows so hot I can hardly think.

"I felt a connection with you that I've never felt with anyone else, and I didn't think it was fair to Tanya."

My skin is on fire.

Edward's voice continues, more softly now. "So if you would give me a call back, I'd like to discuss…_us_."

My skin melts off my bones.

The voicemail ends.

My mind is reeling at the fact that Edward wants to discuss _us_.

How could there possibly be an _us_? We don't know anything about each other, not really. I don't know where he lives, what he does for a living, where he was born. I don't even know what he looks like.

For all I know, he could be a five-foot, 200-pound geek living in his mom's basement. He could have made up all these little details that painted a more impressive picture in my head than the real thing. For all I knew, Tanya was only a figment of Edward's imagination. She hadn't even come up for a long time, not until I'd mentioned Mike.

But, despite my doubts, I know there are some things that Edward can't fake. He can't fake his laugh. He can't fake the way that he always seems to sense when I need him to make me laugh. He can't fake his intelligence, his sensitivity. He can't fake the way he makes me feel.

He makes me feel beautiful.

And he's never even seen me.

And that foot massage…god, he couldn't have faked that foot massage.

I check the date stamp and see that Edward's last phone message to me was two days ago. Knowing him, he's probably been agonizing over my silence.

In a blink, I'm pressing the button to call him back.

I don't even think. I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know anything.

But I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I need to hear his voice.

I'll always need to hear his voice.

"Hello?" Edward's voice is bleary. Belatedly, I realize that I'm calling him in the wee hours of the morning.

"Edward, hi," I say, suddenly feeling stupid and awkward for having woken him up. "It's Bella."

"Hey," he says, sounding instantly more alert.

"I'm really sorry for calling you so late."

"Better late than never." It sounds like he's smiling, but he hasn't laughed, which is what I'd been going for.

"I'm also really sorry about not getting back to you sooner. My phone was stolen on a business trip, and it took me a while to get it replaced."

"Oh," he says, and his tone noticeably brightens. "I'm sorry to hear that. International trip?"

"Yeah."

"I didn't realize you were going to be out of the country."

Translation: Why didn't you tell me you were going to be out of the country?

"I should have told you, but I thought I'd be able to talk while I was there. And if my phone hadn't been stolen, I would have. I had lots of free time in the evening."

"So why are you calling me at 2:30 in the morning?"

"Jet lag."

We soon fall into our comfortable conversational rhythm, Edward continuing to ask me questions about my trip. When he finds out I had been to India, he's pretty excited, as he's apparently never been out of the U.S.

Just like me.

I wish I'd told him about my trip sooner. Mike's travelled overseas regularly and didn't seem to understand my fear.

All the while, I can tell that we are both more tense than usual. Tanya fills the interstices of our conversation, straining the silences more so than usual.

Eventually, Edward gets as much information out of me as he can about my India trip without breaking any of our ground rules. He seems reluctant, however, to take the conversation any further. I wonder if I'm already too late. I wonder if he and Tanya are already back together. I wonder if she is currently sleeping right beside him.

I have to know.

"Edward, I know this isn't a great time, but do you mind if we talk about the voice mails you left me?"

"You got those?" he says. For some reason, he seems surprised.

"Just now, actually."

"Oh."

"You sound disappointed." This part of the conversation isn't going at all how I had planned.

"It's not that. When you told me your phone had been stolen, I for some reason assumed that you didn't get my messages, either. I forgot that your voice mail isn't hardwired into your phone."

We're silent for a second.

"So," I say.

"So," he says.

"I hope you're not wanting to just pretend that those messages don't exist."

"No, that's not it, I swear. I just…" he hesitates. I wonder what nervous gesture he's making. "I feel really stupid about those messages now. I feel guilty about where things are at with Tanya, and I…I wanted you to know the truth."

"You broke up with Tanya because of me?" It's almost a whisper. I almost don't dare hope.

"Yes," he says. It's almost a whisper back. "Not wholly because of you. There are…other things. Tanya and I have been together a long time. I thought, once, that she was the one, but now I'm not so sure.

"To be honest, Bella, I've been feeling more when we talk than I've felt for Tanya in a long, long time."

"I know what you mean."

"You do?"

"Yeah. Mike and I have been dating since we were seniors in high school."

Edward whistles.

I continue, "But he's never…he doesn't…"

"I know what you're saying," Edward says, so I don't have to say it.

We're quiet.

"Where do we go from here?" he says.

"I…don't know."

"I think, at the very least, that we might need to bend our ground rules, just a little. I'd like to know where you live."

My heart rate quickens. I have all kinds of guesses about where Edward might be located. We seem to be in the same time zone. His accent is neutral, neither Southern nor Eastern nor Midwestern.

"What are your guesses?" I almost whisper the question.

He plays along.

But it's our most serious game yet.

"Well," he says slowly. "You've mentioned rain a lot, but no snow. Even when the whole country was getting hit with that one storm. You seem to eat dinner at around the same time I do. You don't have any accent that I can hear."

Slap me sideways, he's been psychoanalyzing _me_.

"So I've got you pegged for either Washington or Florida."

I laugh. "One extreme of the country or the other, huh?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

"How does the Florida fit in?"

"Well, although it's not in the same time zone, it wasn't hit by that snow storm. And they don't have accents down there. And I can just see you as a beach person."

I am a beach person.

"Are you leaning toward either option?"

"Well, I'll tell you right now that my head is leaning toward Florida."

Hm.

"But my heart…my heart is leaning toward Washington."

His heart? What does his heart have to do with this?

He continues, "Because I live in Oregon."

Oregon. He's practically my neighbor.

"Where in Oregon?" I try to remain calm.

"Portland."

My heartbeat intensifies a thousandfold. I just sit here and listen to it hammering out of my chest.

"Bella, you still there?"

"I'm here."

"I take it you don't live in Florida."

"My mom lives in Florida."

"But you don't."

"No."

We just kinda breathe at each other for a while as the knowledge of our nearness sinks in.

"Where do you live in Washington?"

If I tell him, I'm going to make this real.

"Seattle."

It's real.

We breathe at each other some more.

Portland is a three-hour drive from Seattle. I've been to Portland. Edward has probably been to Seattle. We've been living less than three hours apart this whole time.

We can actually see each other. And we won't even need a plane ticket.

Which is good because if I'm ever on a plane again, it will be too soon.

Can I do this? Can I go completely out on a limb and meet some random guy who randomly called my phone only a few short months ago?

Edward says, "Do you want to maybe meet up for coffee sometime? We could meet in Castle Rock. It's right between Portland and Seattle. I stop there sometimes to…"

Edward is babbling. I'm hardly listening. Edward is babbling, and I'm hardly listening because this can't be real.

Edward stops babbling, and we're silent.

"Bella?"

Now only I'm the one who's silent.

"Am I freaking you out?"

"Yes," I say, because he is. "But in a good way."

I can almost see his smile.

I might get to see his smile.

"Do you want to do this?"

Should I do this?

Can I do this?

"Yes."

"Okay." I can tell that Edward is smiling. He might never stop. "When?"

"Not now," I say.

"Okay." I can tell that Edward's smile dims.

"I mean, not today. I can't get away today. I just got back from my trip, and there's something that I need to do first."

If I am going to do this, if I am _really_ going to do this, then I can't possibly stay with Mike. I am not a cheater. I am not going to cheat on him, even if it is something as simple as having a cup of coffee with Edward.

Because we both know that I will not be merely having a cup of coffee with Edward.

"When, Bella?" Edward almost whispers. I know he wants this almost as much as I do.

"How about this weekend?"

This weekend is three days away. Will three days be enough time to talk to Mike? To figure out where the heck I'm going to live?

This is Mike's house.

Most of it is Mike's money.

I will be leaving Mike's house and Mike's money. I will be leaving the job that I have working for Mike's father.

But, for the first time in my life, I might actually be happy.

Edward and I make plans to meet on Saturday. He gives me the name of a little coffee shop in Castle Rock and tells me that he drives a silver, four-door Volvo.

It's Wednesday morning—three days before I'll see Edward for the first time.

We hang up and, as always, we don't say goodbye.

There's no need.

We're going to see each other in three days.


	7. Chapter 7

**------------| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

In three hours, Mike wakes up for work.

He's surprised to see me dressed and ready to head into work as well.

Although we should reduce our carbon footprint by carpooling, we don't. Mike likes to work too late. I like to be at home. Recently, it's because I've been wanting to talk to Edward.

Wednesday at work, I surreptitiously start cleaning out my office. I've been working here for four years; there's a lot of crap to clean out. I save the electronic files I'll need.

Thursday at work, I finish cleaning out my office. I get a few odd looks into the window beside my door, but people can't put their fingers on what is different, I guess. My shelves and walls are empty.

On Thursday evening, I break up with Mike. I'd cooked him his favorite meal—meat and potatoes—and I hand him a glass of wine when he walks in the door, late as usual.

When he notices the single place setting, I say, "I'm not hungry. Still jet-lagged."

I sit across our huge table and watch him eat his final meal. Or at least, the final meal that I will ever see him eat. As I sit, I notice that he doesn't ask me about my day. He doesn't tell me that I look nicer than normal. He doesn't compliment the food I have prepared for him.

Instead, he complains about how his day went. How his boss isn't taking him seriously despite the fact that his father owns the company. How his peers all laugh at him behind his back.

The usual.

I don't tell him that his boss doesn't take him seriously _because_ his father owns the company.

When he's done complaining about his job, I cut him off before he can start complaining about me. I know that he'll probably complain that I didn't support him in our shared meeting today when his boss was laying in to him for something that wasn't exactly his fault.

Mike works at his father's company, too. We're in different departments, but we have to interact sometimes. When we do, Mike complains.

As they say, those who work together don't stay together.

Before he can start complaining about today, I say, "Mike, this isn't working for me."

"What isn't? If you're talking about that project we're on, then I completely agree. Maybe I should ask my dad to make sure we're assigned to different projects from now on."

I wasn't talking about the project.

"Mike, _we're_ not working."

"Baby, you're going to have to be a little clearer than that. I've had a long day."

How's this for clear? "I don't like it when you call me _baby_."

He frowns. "What? I thought you always liked it when I called you _baby_."

"No."

He's gotten distracted, so I need to make myself even more clear. "Mike, I'm breaking up with you."

That's clear enough. Mike's blue eyes meet mine in shock. I used to think those eyes were beautiful.

"What?" he breathes.

"You can't," he says.

"Where will you live?" he says.

"What about my parents?" he says. His parents love me. They absolutely adore us as a couple. Always have. It's one of the reasons why we've lasted as long as we have.

"I don't know where I'm going to live," I answer quietly, honestly. "And your parents will get over it."

"But…" he starts again.

I cut him off.

"Mike, it's over. This isn't fair to you. This isn't fair to either one of us. We've been together for so long, we're just going through the motions. We started dating before we were old enough to know what love was."

Those once-beautiful blue eyes stare at me.

"If you could go back to high school, if you could talk to your 17-year-old self, would you tell him to pick me? Would you tell him to devote nearly a decade of his life to someone who he would only love like a sister?"

"Yes," he says.

I stare back at him.

"No," he says.

"I don't know," he says.

But he does know. He knows I'm right. For the first time, I can see him thinking about what it might feel like to love someone as more than a sister. As more than a girl you grew up with, as more than a girl his parents had picked out for him when he was in diapers.

There's a reason we've never gotten married.

For the first time, I see him alive.

"I'm doing us both a favor," I say gently.

"But what about your job?" he sputters. "It's going to be too weird working together…"

Lucky for me, I hate my job.

I know that by breaking up with Mike, I'm breaking up with his whole family. I no longer want my job at his family-owned business. I will miss my team, but I will not miss my job.

* * *

So Friday, I don't go to work. I send my supervisor an official e-mail that I've resigned, effective immediately. I know that I'm being unprofessional about not giving my two-week notice, particularly since I'm at the manager level, but I can't care.

I send individual farewell e-mails to all the members of my team and to some of my other co-workers I am closest to. To some, I send a carefully neutral e-mail about the fact that I had some personal matters to attend to. I wish them the best of luck. To others, I give a few more details about what, exactly, the personal situation entails. I tell them I've had to make a tough call, and that, in the end, I had to do what's best for me. When they hear the news about my breakup with Mike, which I'm sure is already circulating through the company's gossip mill, they will understand.

I know some of them will be sorry to see me go. Others, not so much.

The rest of the day on Friday, I box up what little is mine in this huge house that Mike and I have shared, and I move out. I leave those pink silk pajamas hanging in the closet, Mike's Christmas present to me last year.

As I walk out the door, I feel ten pounds lighter.

I sit in a room at the nearest hotel and count down the minutes until Saturday. I watch a re-run of the show _Cougar Town_.

On the show, Courteney Cox calls some random guy and asks him if he wants to have sex with her.

I laugh.

He says yes.

If Edward asked, I'd say yes.

* * *

Saturday morning, I get ready for the afternoon, the afternoon in which I will see Edward.

I'm so eager that I'm ready by 9:00 a.m. I've been up since the crack of dawn and have already washed, dried, and curled my hair. I've even applied a bit of makeup.

I don't have anything else to do.

I don't need to leave until after noon, at the earliest. Edward and I aren't supposed to meet up until 4:00 p.m. I plan on getting there thirty minutes early, so I can sneakily wait in the car and watch his car pull up.

For some reason, I want to see him before he sees me.

I don't need to leave for another four hours. At the earliest.

So I sit on the edge of my hard, small hotel room bed and think about calling Edward.

I think about starting my drive early.

I think about calling Edward.

I think about the fact that 9:00 a.m. is entirely too early to start my drive.

I think about calling Edward.

I think about using my laptop to see if there are any bookstores around the little coffee shop.

I think about calling Edward.

My phone rings.

It's Edward.

I am nearly speechless with happiness.

"Hello?" I say.

"Hello," a voice says.

A voice that isn't Edward's.

Because it's female.

"Uh, hi," I repeat.

"So you're Bella." The woman's voice is flat, but not angry. Instead, she almost sounds resigned. She sounds sad.

I hazard a guess. "And you must be Tanya."

"Yes."

"Where's Edward?"

"He's in the shower."

I'm numb. Why is she there while Edward is in the shower?

Tanya continues, "I hope you don't mind I called. I've been hoping to talk to you about something." She speaks lightly, almost as if we are old friends. I can't believe that Edward has told her about me. I can't believe that Tanya has called me from Edward's phone.

He's hinted that she's a little overbearing.

I can see why.

But then she says something that completely destroys my gleeful mental image of her as a domineering, overprotective girlfriend.

"I wanted to thank you," Tanya says quietly.

Thank me? "For what?"

"For giving Edward someone to talk to these last few months. For making him happy."

I'm absolutely floored. Tanya voice is sincere, without a hint of snark. She seems to genuinely mean what she's saying. I don't know how to reply, so I don't.

I didn't know that Tanya knew Edward was speaking to me.

Mike hadn't known that I was speaking to Edward.

Although at one point, I implied that Mike did know.

Maybe that's when Edward told Tanya.

I'm starting to feel sick.

She keeps talking. "I've been going through some stuff over the last few months; it's made Edward question whether he wants to be with me."

I'm confused. Three days ago, Edward had told me he had flat-out broken up with Tanya several months ago. Not that he is merely questioning their relationship.

"I'm sorry," I say lamely, as she pauses to let me say something.

"It's not your fault." She takes a deep breath. "You see, Bella, I'm pregnant."

I'm sick.

I'm very, very sick.

This conversation is quickly spiraling out of control. Tanya seems rational. She seems nice. Her voice is beautiful, just as I'm sure she is.

I'm sure she's radiantly pregnant.

This is the first time that I have ever let myself think about the fact that maybe Edward isn't what he seems, either.

I say the first thing that comes to mind. I fight not to let my voice shake. I desperately don't want her to know how much she is affecting me.

"You're pregnant?" I say this like I'm asking her if the sun is shining today. "Does Edward know?"

"Yeah. He found out several months ago, the day he decided to call a random number. I think maybe he was trying to escape the reality of his life. We've always discussed kids, but not this soon."

Tanya keeps talking to me, but all I can think about is that Edward is going to be a father.

"He's been pretty distant ever since he found out. I think he's been in denial."

Forget my original mental image of Tanya the seductress drinking expensive wine and running her beautiful feet up Edward's beautiful leg. Now I picture Tanya dressed all in white, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, with a delicate hand resting on her slightly swollen belly.

Edward is a god after all—a god who's impregnated the Virgin Mary.

"I thought you should know."

Edward hasn't said a word to me about Tanya being pregnant. Not even a hint. Not even a well-timed pause. I could always tell that he was leaving something out on that front, but I never would have guessed how big of a something.

"Had Edward told you about this?"

"No." I can't trust my voice.

"I didn't think so. He's been having a hard time adjusting to the idea. It didn't quite fit in with his life plan." She laughs, a beautiful sound of tinkling bells. Even Tanya's laugh is beautiful. "I'm sure you know how anal he can get about his life plan."

I don't, not really. We haven't exactly discussed our life plans because that would have likely involved breaking some of our ground rules. But I at least know that he is anal about sticking to our ground rules. And about his peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwiches, which he's described to me at great length.

"Well, now that you know, I wanted to ask you something."

This was it. This was the point where Tanya was going to tell me to back off.

"I wanted to talk to you woman to woman and find out what your intentions are toward my fiancée."

And the other shoe has just dropped.

Edward is engaged?

Edward has a pregnant fiancée?

"I have no intentions," I garble out. "Edward and I have just been phone buddies."

"A way to blow off steam," I say.

"I don't even know his last name. I don't know where he lives," I say. It's mostly true. Portland is a big place.

Tanya lets out a breath that she'd been holding. Clearly, she hasn't heard anything about our ground rules. Maybe Edward hasn't told her everything after all.

Just like he hasn't quite told me everything.

"That's good to hear," Tanya says. "I was afraid…" Her voice trembles. I can just see her shaking like a precious little lamb.

Then she says the last thing I ever expected to hear. "I'm glad he has you as a friend, then. You seem nice."

Tanya is a saint.

There is no way in heaven I am going to let Edward leave his saintly, pregnant fiancée for me. Edward isn't the kind of man I want if he is even considering doing so.

The Edward I know doesn't exist.

I've just left my friends, my job, my life for a man who doesn't even exist.

"You still there, Bella?"

"Yeah, sorry. Just thinking."

Dying, actually. But she doesn't have to know that.

"I know it's a lot to take in. I'm sorry that Edward didn't tell you."

Tanya is apologizing for him now. I think I might faint. I think I might throw up.

"Oh, he's done with his shower."

For some reason, I panic. Tanya is the one who'd made a call from Edward's phone and is currently spilling all his secrets to the random stranger that Edward has been lying to for months. But she seems to be the picture of calm and composed.

And why shouldn't she be? She's holding the ace in the hole. Literally.

I say, "Please don't tell him we talked."

"What?" Tanya seems shocked.

"Not yet, at least. There's something I need to say to him first."

"Okay," Tanya says slowly. "I can respect that. It was nice to meet you, Bella."

"Yeah." She seems nice, but it hasn't been nice to meet her at all. So I don't lie and say it was.

"Bye."

We hang up.

I go into the bathroom and throw up.

In six hours, I'm supposed to meet Edward for coffee. We are supposed to have our big discussion about _us_.

I laugh darkly.

There will never be an _us_.


	8. Chapter 8

**------------| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

The next six hours pass in a blur of meaningless television, faces that I can't focus on and jokes that I don't laugh at.

_Cougar Town_ comes on again, and I immediately change the channel.

I can't move from my spot on the bed, can't eat, can't sleep.

I can only wait.

I can only watch the clock.

My emotions are in complete turmoil. I vacillate from being so angry I want to crush my phone in my bare palm to being so desperate for that same phone to ring. I want to hear Edward's voice. I want to never hear Edward's voice again. I want Edward to tell me that Tanya is lying. I never want to speak to Edward again.

I don't know what I want.

All I know for sure is that this chapter in my life is over. The exciting little non-affair has been found out, real life has intruded, and everything is coming crashing down around my ears.

And Mike.

Oh god, Mike.

I cut him loose because I believed Edward's lies. I destroyed the only good thing in my life, my one constant, for nothing. Maybe, if I tell him the truth, he will take me back.

Maybe.

I have technically cheated on him with another man. Not in flesh, but in spirit. That is a hard thing for any man to recover from. I'm not sure that Mike can or would. I have severely crippled our relationship, perhaps for good.

Does it matter? Do I want him to take me back?

As 4:00 p.m. draws nearer, I'm becoming thoroughly depressed.

I wonder what Edward is doing, right now. I wonder if, like me, he'd planned on being at the coffee shop early. I wonder if he is sitting in his little silver Volvo, waiting for a little red beetle to pull up.

I wonder when he's going to realize that a little red beetle is never going to pull up.

4:00 p.m. comes and goes. Edward might know that something is wrong by now. He'll give me fifteen minutes, and then he'll start to worry.

Maybe my car broke down. Maybe I'm having trouble finding the place.

Maybe I have decided not to come at all.

By 4:30, my phone still hasn't rung. Edward has not called to make sure that I am okay.

Maybe he isn't going to call at all. Maybe, like me, he'd never gone to that little coffee shop. That's probably it—Tanya probably told him about our conversation after all. They'd probably spent the morning together, having yet more heart-to-hearts about whether Edward is going to man up and be a father or not. Maybe, in a fit of guilt, he'd come clean about me. Maybe, she reciprocated by confessing that she and I had had our own heart-to-heart today.

Maybe they are having wild, pregnant make-up sex at this very moment.

At this very moment, my phone lights up and begins to buzz.

I stare at it for a second like it is a bee come to bite me. Then I pick it up and flip it open.

"Hello?"

I don't even look at the screen to see who it is. For some reason, I can't. Maybe it's just Charlie. Maybe it's just Renee. I haven't told them yet about me quitting my job, about me breaking up with Mike, but maybe they've heard some other way.

"Hey." It's Edward. He sounds wary.

"Hey," I say.

"So you're not dead." An attempt at levity. He's gone to the coffee shop. I can hear noises around him, like he's outside in a small-town commercial area.

"No," I say.

"I was late getting here. Tanya dropped by, and she didn't seem to want to leave."

I have a flash of their beautiful legs and feet entwined together on silk sheets.

He continues, "I'm freaking out, rushing up here as fast as my car can go. Imagine my surprise to find that you're not here yet either."

It's almost a question.

"No," I confirm.

We breathe at each other for a while. This time, the breathing is not full of excitement and adrenaline and hope. It's full of doubt and fear and death.

"Are you coming?" he finally asks.

"No."

"Do you mind if I ask why?" He sounds sad, lost.

Obviously, Tanya has kept our little secret. Whatever conversations they had ended up having over the course of the afternoon, they had not been about me.

I feel relieved.

I take a deep breath. "Edward, I…"

But I can't finish that sentence. I want to say, "Edward, I know about the baby" or even merely, "Edward, I talked to Tanya."

But I can't.

Edward seems to understand that I can't go any further.

"I'll just talk for a second, then."

"Edward, I—"

"Please. Let me just say this. I've been wanting to say this to you since the night after we started talking." He paused, collecting his thoughts, and I didn't interrupt him. Let him say what he had to say. It wouldn't change anything.

"I wanted to tell you this in person. I wanted you to be able to look into my eyes and see that I mean it."

Not for the first time, I wonder what color his eyes are. Now, I'll never know.

He continues, "When I talk to you, I feel…something I've never felt before with anyone. This connection, like…like…"

Like our souls had reached out and grasped hands.

He says, "Like I don't even know how to describe. You're smart, you're funny, you're caring. You get me. You don't really even know me, but you've been willing to dedicate hours of your life to supporting me, to giving me advice, to listening to me when I've had a bad day."

A day ago, my spirits would have been soaring at hearing Edward say these words. I'd dreamed of him saying these words to me ever since I first heard his voice. Today, my spirits are plummeting. Each of his words is a knife sliced into my ribcage and rotated for good measure.

Even if he means what he is saying, even if he is telling me the truth here where he hasn't elsewhere—it does not matter.

"I guess what I'm trying to say, Bella, is that…I care about you. Deeply. I think I might love you."

The knife plunges directly into my heart. How can he love me? He doesn't even _know_ me.

He chuckles, a low, nervous chuckle. "I know that sounds crazy. I don't know you. Not really. I don't know where you grew up. I don't know what expression you make when you're telling me a funny story. Heck, I don't know any expressions you make, period."

He sighs. "I know that it's crazy. But these last few months, you've made me feel more…alive than I ever have. I couldn't stay with Tanya knowing that there was someone else out there I wanted to get to know more."

We are silent for a few long moments. And then I must have made a noise.

"Bella, are you alright? Are you…crying?"

I am.

At some point during his little schpiel about how he loves me, the tears started to flow; only a light mist at first but rapidly graduating to an all-out torrential downpour.

"Yes," I say, and it is the only word I can say. I'm crying too hard.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't mean to make you…"

He says, "I didn't mean to just…"

He says, "I didn't mean to drop this on you so unexpectedly."

He sounds a little frantic, as though he is afraid he has scared me.

He's always been so considerate.

"It's okay," I say with a sniffle. "Give me…a minute."

And he does. He gives me as many minutes as I need, until I have calmed down enough to the point where I can speak again.

I can only imagine what horrible things he thinks as he sits there patiently. I hope that his thoughts pain him as much as mine have pained me over this day. But he doesn't say a word. He's good like that.

He is too good.

He is a lie.

"Edward," I say.

"Yes," he breathes, a man awaiting a sentence of life or death.

In that moment, I decide that I'm not going to tell Edward the truth. All day, I have envisioned this conversation going a lot differently. I have envisioned me indignantly confronting Edward with my conversation with Tanya. I imagined him getting defensive, trying frantically to come up with excuses that would explain everything away. I imagined listening calmly to his flimsy excuses, hearing in them the man he'd been all along.

Then I had imagined coolly delivering a parting line, something flippant like, "See you around, Edward."

Because he never would, see?

And then I would have hung up.

But now.

Now, I want quick and painless. Edward has just bared part of his beautiful soul to me. I don't want to see the other half of it, ugly lies and flimsy excuses. I don't want this conversation to become a tangle of accusations and hurt. I just want this conversation to be over. I want to remember Edward the way I'd always pictured him—as Michaelangelo's statue of David.

I see him as a god; I don't want to see him as a man.

"Edward," I repeat. "The last several months have been some of the best of my life. I've had a lot of fun talking to you. I looked forward to our conversations each night. You're a great guy."

"But," he says. His voice is tight, low. He can tell already where I am going with this. I keep going with it.

"But, I've never seen you as anything more than a friend." Here's where the lying really comes in. "I couldn't come meet you for coffee today because I…love my boyfriend. I love Mike."

"No you don't," he says, almost a whisper.

I'm shocked. "What?"

"No, you don't," he repeats more firmly. "You paused before you said it. And if you loved him, really loved him, you wouldn't have kept talking to me. You probably would never have called me back in the first place."

He's right. But I can't let him know that.

"I was…confused. Mike and I have been together our whole lives. We're in a rut. Things aren't as exciting as they used to be. You made me feel wanted. You made me feel special."

Edward is silent.

"You made me see that Mike is the right guy for me after all. I paused only because I was afraid of hurting you."

"Okay," Edward says.

And that's all he says for a long while. It is my turn to wait patiently until he has composed himself. I don't think he's crying. But I think he's close.

I think he believes my lies.

Good.

At long last, he says, "Can I just ask you one thing?" His voice is faint, broken.

"Yes."

"Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn't get back together with Tanya?"

The question almost breaks me.

I can think of a thousand reasons why he shouldn't get back together with Tanya, reasons that don't even involve me. Despite what she'd seemed like on the phone, he'd told me enough about her for me to know that she wasn't the right person for him.

But I say, "No, I can't."

My voice is dead, flat. But he doesn't pick up on my tone. For several long moments, we both breathe into the phone.

"Okay," he says. His voice sounds as dead and flat as mine.

"Okay," he repeats. "I…value your opinion."

"You're right," he says. "This has been…fun, Bella."

I know that he used the word _fun_ because I had. I know he thinks that this has been so much more than fun.

And it has been. It has been more than fun. But it's over now.

This is best for everyone.

Well, except for me.

"I just have one question for you," I say.

Edward waits.

"Why would you even consider getting back together with Tanya?"

Edward sighs.

"Because she's pregnant. She needs me."

Edward speaks as though the words pain him.

But the words pain me far, far more.

He didn't lie.

But this truth is so, so much harder to hear.

"Okay," I say.

"I understand," I say.

"Bella," he says. "It's complicated."

"Yeah," I say.

"I have to go," I say.

"Fine," he says.

He sounds defeated.

"Are we done?" he says.

I answer him with a simple, "Goodbye."

The first goodbye I've ever said to him. And then I leave him with my dial tone.

We're done.

I throw down my phone and finish out my cry.


	9. Chapter 9

**------------| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

It's funny how life can change in the course of only a few days. Three days, to be precise.

Three days ago, I had a job, a boyfriend, a house, and an exciting non-affair with a smart and likely attractive man.

I had a life.

Three days later, I have nothing.

Nowhere to be, nothing to do, nothing to look forward to.

Not even a phone call.

I have made that simple mistake, the one that your mom and your teachers and your friends warn you about all your life.

I put all my eggs in one basket.

And then that basket promptly fell off a cliff.

The eggs have shattered, my life has seeped through the cracks, and I'm left with nothing but hollow shells to show for myself.

I'm sitting in a rinky-dink hotel in a city that is no longer home, with no one to talk to, no one to call.

I remember how excited I'd been to hear that Edward lived on the West Coast. I remember how my heart had pounded, how my palms had sweat, how my skin had burned.

We're so near, yet so far.

So I do the only thing that I can.

I cry for a while.

And then I get in my little red beetle and drive back to Forks, much wearier and wiser than when I had left.

* * *

I haven't been home in a few years, but nothing much has changed. Charlie is surprised to have me show up on his doorstep, but he doesn't complain. He wraps in me in a bear hug and readily agrees when I ask him if I can stay with him for a while. He doesn't even ask why. In the time it took me to drive home, the Forks gossip mill has probably already done its job.

Out of guilt, I clean his house from garage to attic. I cook his meals.

Months pass.

I spend the time cooking and cleaning for Charlie, who's tickled pink to have me home. Or maybe just tickled gray. I don't really see Charlie as a "pink" type of guy.

Kinda like I'm not a "pink" type of girl.

I spend the time looking for a job in Forks. It won't be a long-term gig, I know that, but I need something to occupy my hands while I figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

Jobs in Forks are hard to find, which is why it's been months and I'm still looking. Charlie has offered to call in a favor or two, but I won't have any of it. It's awful enough as it is to be an almost thirty, formerly successful businesswoman whose had to come live back home with her father because she made one serious error in judgment. I don't want to feel even worse about myself by not being able to find my own job.

One of the small business owners in town feels sorry for me at last. I can tell by my first day at work in the public library that it doesn't get enough patronage to warrant two people on deck. At least the little old lady who mans the place is only paying me minimum wage.

I've gone from a six-figure salary to six dollars an hour.

Needless to say, my self-esteem is at an all-time low.

As I work at the mindless tasks that the librarian makes up for me to do to earn my meager salary, I think about my options. I know that I should move back to the city and make a fresh start, find a new job, maybe work toward buying my own, smaller house somewhere in the Seattle suburbs.

But somehow, I just can't.

I'm stuck, like I was in that hotel room the day I waited for Edward's final call.

I'm waiting for something.

I just don't know what that something is.

It's certainly not for Edward to call again, that's for sure.

I no longer have my phone, anyway.

I can't afford the bill.

* * *

"Bella, have you ever considered moving to Jacksonville?"

Charlie and I are eating a microwave dinner in front of the TV. The rubbery green beans are squeaking as I chew. I stop chewing, certain that I've misheard him.

"Like, move to live closer to mom?"

"Yeah."

"Do you think that would be a good idea?"

Renee and Phil have settled down. And then they had promptly adopted a baby. A little girl. Just like that, I felt replaced. I've never met her, but I've seen a lot of pictures. Her name is Angela.

Her name almost rhymes with _Bella_.

Renee has always assured me that she would absolutely love it if I would come and visited, if I would come and get to know my sister Angela.

But I know better.

She might think that it would be great, but it would be weird. I would have to get used to seeing my mom cuddle that beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde-haired child. Bella 2.0. The new and improved model.

No thanks.

Charlie says that he thinks Jacksonville might be a nice change of pace.

"What's wrong with Forks?" I tease.

"Nothing's wrong with Forks, Bella. I'm just not sure that you're adjusting all that well."

That's probably because I'm not. At this point, I'm just trying to survive.

I'm waiting.

"I like Forks," I say. It isn't a complete lie. Forks is home. Unfortunately, home is where Mike and I grew up together. I can't go anywhere in the town without being reminded of him.

The price you pay, I guess.

Home is always half heart and half hurt. That's kinda the way it works.

So I haven't been going out much.

Our conversation ends.

I go back to playing the waiting game.

Charlie doesn't mention me moving to Jacksonville again. But I can tell that he is worried about me.

* * *

One day, the waiting game is over.

One morning, I wake up, and something feels different. The fact that I feel at all is new; I haven't felt anything in so long but apathy and depression that at first I find it difficult to name this new emotion that I'm feeling.

I feel hopeful.

I think about going to work, and I feel excited. I don't know how the prospect of shuffling books around makes me excited, but it does.

When I come down for breakfast, Charlie notices that something is different.

"Did you do something to your hair?"

Obviously, he can't see what's different. My hair is in its same old pony tail.

I think he's reacting to the fact that I'm smiling.

I'm standing here in the middle of our tiny yellow kitchen, and I'm smiling. I might be smiling at the dreadful, artificial yellow color that Renee had painted the cabinets when she and Charlie had first moved in.

I'm sure she'd intended the yellow to be cheerful.

But the yellow had faded to a sickly, puke green. The fact that our kitchen is puke green makes me smile. Making people think about puke in a room that is designed for eating. No wonder Charlie and I often eat out on the couch. His little dining room table gets less use than an umbrella in Phoenix.

I resolve to re-paint the kitchen cabinets at the earliest opportunity.

I eat my breakfast. I give Charlie a cheerful send-off to work. I ignore his dazed yet suspicious expression. I go upstairs and brush my teeth and check my hair a final time in my dresser's mirror.

I don't think I've even looked in that mirror since I've gotten here.

I go downstairs, grab my keys from their hook, and open the front door.

And then I freeze.

I freeze because there, standing on my front porch, is one of the most attractive people that I've ever seen in real life. He's male and tall and his right arm is in a fist and is raised as though he is about to knock on the door.

And his eyes.

Well.

I probably don't even have to tell you how beautiful his eyes are.

He lowers his hand, the hand that he'd been about to use to knock.

"Are you Bella?" he says with perfectly shaped lips in a perfectly shaped jaw in a perfectly shaped face on a perfectly shaped body.

I see all these things about him, all these beautiful, perfect features that hit me all at once, like a rush of images so quick that you can't digest each one.

I see these things, but I'm thinking about his voice.

I know that voice.

He continues staring at me with this perfect look on his face, a look of contrition and desperation and hope. He's looking at me like I'm his savior.

I slam the door in his pretty little face.

The door is very thin, so I can clearly hear him mutter, "I take that as a yes."

Even through the door, I know his voice. Every cell in my body knows that voice. Without my bidding, my body presses up against that door, the better to be closer to that voice.

"Bella," the voice says louder. "I just wanted a chance to introduce myself."

I don't answer, but the voice continues on.

He says, "I'm Edward."

He says, "Edward Cullen."

He's just broken one of our rules.

I was never supposed to know his last name.

"Go away," I say. "No one named Bella lives here."

He's silent for a moment.

"I know that voice," he says. "You're Bella, aren't you?"

"No," I say. "Please, just go away."

"I need—"

"Leave—"

"—to talk to you."

"—now."

I can't talk to him. Not now. Not ever.

So I remain quiet. He should know by now how stubborn I am.

"Okay," he says, almost so quietly that I can't hear. But I do.

"Okay," he repeats, and I hear him stepping quietly off the porch. "I'm leaving."

I feel both relieved and sad at the same time.

"But I'm coming back."

I race up the stairs to my room just in time to see a silver, four-door Volvo peel away from my curb.

What did he mean, he's "coming back"?

* * *

After I'm sure that he's gone, I rush outside, get into Charlie's truck, and am off to work. I go to work so that I won't be at home when he comes back. I go to work so that he won't know where I am. As I drive, I feel like someone's eyes are watching me. Someone's beautiful green eyes.

But I make it to work without even seeing the merest flash of a silver Volvo.

At work, I'm distracted. I find myself lingering too long at the front window of the library, the window that conveniently looks out on Main Street.

But I still don't see a silver Volvo.

Where on earth is he going to go? He has to go somewhere before he can come back. There are only so many somewheres in Forks.

Reluctantly, I leave my post at the window and head to the back of the library, where there are stacks of books waiting to be put back where they belong so that little kids can come in and snatch them right up again.

It's a vicious cycle.

I spend the next hour sorting a vomitus of books into a neat stack, organized alphabetically. I carefully maneuver the stack from a table into my waiting arms. The stack is so tall that I have to hold it in place with my chin. And then I head back out to the shelves to put each book in its rightful slot.

As I round the corner of my very first bookshelf, I come face-to-face with Edward.

Again.

He's standing in the middle of the little kids' section of the Forks public library.

This time, I'm completely exposed, no door for me to slam in his face.

He seems to realize it, too, and he smiles slightly, a gentle curve of only one side of his mouth. An expression that looks suspiciously like a smirk.

"Sorry…I saw your car…" he says, I guess by way of explanation for why he's stalking me through the book stacks.

I can't slam a door in his face, but I can run. I can hide.

I don't worry about the fact that I just spent an hour stacking the books I'm holding. I don't worry about the fact that they're currently in order from A to Z.

Instead, I release my hands and vomit the stack of kid's books all over Edward's feet. I whirl and head for the nearby door marked "Employees Only."

From behind me, I hear him call, "Bella wait!"

I hear him kicking books out of his way.

But I've already disappeared through the door.

I stand in the middle of the book sorting room—more of a closet, really—and pant. I'm _panting_. I'm no athlete, but I'm breathing hard from taking the few steps I'd needed to high-tail it out of there.

Okay, so maybe I'm breathing hard for a completely different reason. Anger. Or excitement. Or both.

There are no other exits from this room. If Edward is patient—and I know he is—he could merely sit in the library all day and wait for me to emerge.

Of course, he doesn't know that there aren't any other exits.

So, of course, about five seconds after I'd just decided that we'd make it into a contest—who could wait whom out—the door flies open, and Edward almost runs into me in his haste to enter.

I put my hands up to ward him off, and he comes to a screeching halt.

I'm glad.

I don't want to touch him. I can't.

Turns out, I can't look at him, either.

He's hurting my eyes.

In a good way.

So I look down at my feet.

"Didn't you see the sign?" I mumble.

"What?" I'm gratified that he's breathing hard, too.

"This is for Employees Only."

I peek up to see him smile again, that wonderful, delicious smile. "I'm sure, given the circumstances, that your boss would make an exception."

"I wouldn't want her to."

Silence stretches between us for a moment.

This was _nothing_ like our comfortable silences on the phone while we each thought of something new to say. There was nothing comfortable about this silence. There was nothing comfortable about trying to think of something to say when a person is standing two feet in front of you in an enclosed space.

"I just need to talk to you. I just need to tell you one thing and then, if you still want me to leave, I'll leave. And I won't come back."

I ponder his offer for a moment.

"You're taller than I expected."

He barks out a laugh, that laugh that I so love. Then he sobers, and my stomach clenches at the thought that the owner of that laugh, the laugh that I so love, is standing right in front of me. I could reach out and touch the hard, flat abs responsible for that laugh, abs that are loosely concealed by his grey t-shirt. I could stand up, up on my tippy toes, and kiss that laugh right out of his mouth.

But I don't.

I can't.

Then he says, "You're even more beautiful than I expected."

I could never have expected him to say that.

He always did make me feel beautiful.

"Do you want to go somewhere?" I say.

He laughs again, but it's his nervous laugh. Not the laugh that I want to drink right out of his lips.

"I thought you'd never ask," he says.

"Being this close to you without being able to touch you is pretty much killing me," he says.

The thought of this lying, two-timing, pansying-out father touching me makes my skin crawl.

But in a good way.

Gah.

We go somewhere.

I follow him to his car, which is parked a few blocks away, down Main Street, obscured from my view by the Crowley's beat up blue van. No wonder I hadn't been able to see it.

Stupid blue van.

I walk a couple of paces behind him, the better to acquaint myself with the way his body moves. As expected, it moves well, but my position makes him uncomfortable. He keeps peeking back at me and slowing down his long, even strides.

But when he slows down, I do, too, until we're moving at only a snail's pace toward his car.

"Do you have something against walking next to people?"

"No," I say. "I just have something against walking next to _you_."

That hurts him, I can see it by his face, but he deserves it. After all, he's a lying, two-timing, pansying-out father. He speeds up and stands waiting for me by his car. I walk around the car's nose and slip in to the passenger's seat.

We drive to somewhere.

I don't know where we're going, but I'll know it when I see it.

As we drive, I sit in his pristine car and I smell him. I watch his hand gripping the shifter as he changes gears.

He has a nice car.

He has nice hands.

He smells nice.

He drives like a bat out of hell.

"Can you slow down? You don't even know where we're going."

He looks at me, a ghost of a smile on his lips. "Do you?"

"No," I say, staring straight ahead. "But I'll know it when I see it."

He slows down. Marginally. When we get to a crossroads, he cocks his head at me. I still say nothing. He idles for a moment, then turns left. The turn feels right. He's on highway 101, heading north. Away from Forks.

We remain quiet. Again, the quiet is not comfortable. I'm acutely aware of his scent, of his lean thighs encased in dark jeans. Of his left foot working the clutch.

He's wearing a pair of slim black Nikes. I never pictured him as a Nikes type of guy. We hadn't discussed it. Somehow, I would have thought Adidas.

I'm reminded that I don't know this person sitting next to me. That the Edward I know is a lie. That I'm going to give the Edward sitting next to me one chance to explain…whatever it is that he can possibly explain…and then I'm going to ask him to leave.

Again.

And he won't come back.

He promised.

"Stop!" I say forcefully, and Edward slams on his brakes.

"What is it?" Edward's eyes are wide, his breathing accelerated. He probably thinks I saw a deer.

"You passed it."

His head swivels to look to where I'm pointing. There, nearly hidden behind a curtain of trees, is a gravel turn-off.

I had never seen it before.

But I have now.

And that's where we need to go.

Edward shifts the car into reverse and turns down the little gravel road.

"Do you know where we're going?"

"No. But I'll know it when I see it."

Turns out, we both know it when we see it. As we curve and bump along the little gravel road, an old house begins to peek into view from around the trees. I suspect it is the old Masen house, but I've never visited it before. It's been abandoned since before I was born.

It had once been beautiful, but it is no longer. However, as we draw closer, I see that it's nothing that paint and a lot of love can't fix. The foundation seems straight; the beams seem strong.

Edward pulls up right in front of the house.

"Is this it?" he asks.

I just nod.

I just watch as he gets out of the car and comes around to open my door.

As I'd always suspected, Edward is a gentleman.

He even holds out his hand for me as I shift my weight to get out.

But I don't touch him.

His hand hangs helpfully in the air until I'm safely to my feet, and then he slips it in the pocket of his jeans.

I close my car door, and we stand for a moment, looking at the house, our respective hands in our respective pockets.

"So," he says.

"Do you mind if I apologize now?" he says.

I take the few steps to the porch and sit down on the steps.

"Yes."

I'm ready.

I'm done waiting.

Edward sits down beside me on the porch steps and looks into the forest. Sitting here looking studiously into the trees, we can almost pretend that we're on the phone.

Almost.

"Would you mind if I asked you one question?" Edward asks.

"I thought you were going to tell me something," I say.

"I thought you were going to apologize," I say.

"I am," he says.

"I will," he says.

"But I'd like to ask you one question first, if that's okay."

"Okay."

For a moment, he sits and breathes. It's a completely different feeling to listen to him breathe when I can feel his breath stirring the air. When I can smell the mint and cinnamon on his teeth.

"Why didn't you come to the coffee shop that day?"

This is not the question I expect. I've already answered this question.

"The truth," he amends.

He wants the truth? I'll give him the truth.

"Because the Edward I was going to see wasn't the Edward I thought I knew."

He lets out a minty breath.

"That's…not what I expected you to say."

"Did you imagine something so cryptic?"

"Not really."

"What did you think I was going to say?"

He shifts his weight, and the porch step creaks. I fight not to look at him.

"We'll get to that. I want to know what you meant by that cryptic answer."

"I meant that the Edward I'd been talking to on the phone wasn't going to be the Edward I was going to see."

"Well that helped," he mutters. He thinks for a while. He doesn't look at me. I think he's finding it easier to talk without looking at me, too. "Do you mean that you were afraid that your vision of me, your expectations of who I am, wouldn't match up to the real deal?"

"No, I mean that I already _knew_ that my vision of you wouldn't match up to you. By that point, I wasn't afraid at all."

"How did you already know?"

"Because Tanya called me."

He curses under his breath, and I can't help but look over then. I've never heard Edward curse. I can't picture such an ugly word coming from such pretty lips.

He says, "That backstabbing little witch."

"Is that any way to speak of the mother of your child?"

His turn to look over at me.

"The mother of my…"

His green eyes grow impossibly large, impossibly round. We stare at each other. We stare right at each other. Not at the trees or at our lips or at our foreheads. Right at each other.

Then Edward says, very slowly, "You didn't come to the coffee house because Tanya told you that she was pregnant with my child."

He's staring at me the whole time, and those eyes are making me very nervous.

I nod and stare at him right back.

"You had not envisioned me as the type of person who would ever dream of abandoning my child; thus, your vision of me on the phone did not match up with whom you expected to find at that coffee house."

I nod again and keep staring.

"So you didn't come."

I nod a final time, and he runs a hand roughly through his messy hair. This time, I stare at his hand, knowing that I'm seeing the nervous gesture I have so wondered about.

"It's so obvious," he says. "I don't know why I didn't see it before."

"See what?" Now he's the one being cryptic. I don't enjoy being on the receiving end quite as much as I did being on the giving end.

"Bella, Tanya _is_ pregnant."

"I know. You told me on the phone already." If he'd come all the way up here to tell me that again, then he's going to be sorely mistaken by my reaction.

But his smile just grows wider.

"She's pregnant," he says, "but not with my child."

Come again?

"Are you saying that Tanya got herself knocked up by some other bloke while you guys were broken up and then came crying back to you pretending like it was your baby?"

"Um," he says.

"Yes," he says.

"That's exactly what I'm saying," he says.

"Do you think I'm stupid?" I say.

That wipes the smile right off his smug little face.

"That's like…the most clichéd girlfriend story ever. I think I read it in _Cosmopolitan_ once."

He shrugs. "What can I say? Tanya is pretty much a walking cliché."

I'm incredulous. Edward just seems to be digging his hole deeper. "Then why did you ever date her?"

"Because I didn't know any better. All the women I'd ever known had been clichés. But then I met you."

The phrase itself is a cliché, but no one ever said that clichés don't work when used properly.

"Let me get this straight. Tanya comes to you on the very day that you're about to profess your undying love for me."

"Yes."

"She tries to pawn off her demon spawn as your own."

"Yeah."

"And you go along with it because you're not the type of person who would ever abandon your child, no matter who you'd sired it on."

"That's a gross way to phrase that, but yes."

I pause for a second while I sort this all out in my brain. I feel like there's a punch line in here somewhere…

"So how did you figure out that the kid is not yours?"

There it is.

"Well, because it eventually occurred to me to do the math."

I'd never been a big math person.

"What math?"

"Tanya told me that she's three months pregnant. I counted backward from there and realized that there's absolutely no way that the kid is mine. We hadn't been…together…in much longer than three months."

I feel warm inside. If I'm doing my own math right, it means that Edward and Tanya hadn't been…together…since well before we started talking on the phone.

"When did you finally do the math?" I ask.

"About two days after what I thought would be my final conversation with you."

"Huh. Tanya told me that she'd told you she was pregnant the day you first called me."

Edward frowns. "Like, six months ago?"

This is too much math for me.

"Yeah. Why did you really dial my number that day, Edward?"

Edward spoke quietly, rationally. "I swear that it was because of _Cougar Town_. I lied to you about my name, but about nothing else. At that point, there was no pregnant Tanya. I broke up with her, she hooked up with some guy named Seth, and then she apparently devised a devious plan that would simultaneously force her and me back together and you and me apart."

"How did she know there _was_ a you and me?"

He sighs. "Because, when I broke up with her, I told her there was someone else."

Ouch.

"What did you do when you figured out the kid wasn't yours?"

"I confronted Tanya about it. Things got ugly. Faces got scratched. Manhoods were questioned. Then she screamed something about you."

"Wow."

"That she'd said your name at all clued me in to the fact that she might have had something to do with our little misunderstanding."

Two understatements. Our misunderstanding had been anything but little. And Tanya had flat-out caused it. With pleasure, apparently.

I mentally downgrade her back from saint to slut.

Edward is watching my face like he would love to be able to read my mind. "She spoke to you, didn't she?"

"Yeah. While you were in the shower, I assume getting ready to come see me that Saturday."

"Ah," he says, his eyes going all soft as he thinks. "That would explain why she seemed so amazingly smug when I got out."

I can't resist a question of my own. "Why was she even there?"

"She assured me that she'd given me back all copies of my apartment key. But she'd lied. You can imagine my utter shock when I stepped out of the shower to find Tanya lounging by the sink, holding me out a towel."

I'd rather imagine Edward period in that scenario, so I do. But the image is tainted by Tanya. As everything between us forever will be.

"I almost had a hag-induced heart attack."

I almost smile.

"She said we needed to talk. I said we didn't have anything to talk about. And then she dropped the baby bomb."

Edward sighs and rolls his shoulders back in frustration.

"She threw me for a complete loop. She'd been pressuring me so hard to get back together, and I'd been pushing so hard to keep her away. At that point, I only wanted you. And here I was, about to have you, and I find out I'm about to have a baby instead."

He stares at me, right into my eyes. "I went to the coffee shop anyway, although it was late by the time I finally pried Tanya's talons out of me. I thought I could make the baby thing work. I thought I could still make _us_ work. And then you tell me that there will never be any us."

I close my eyes against his Kryptonite gaze. It's all too much.

"And I listen to you, and my head is telling me one thing. Your voice is telling me one thing." His own voice drops to a whisper. "But my heart is telling me another."

My eyes are closed, and I'm just listening to his voice say those same words that he'd said to me so long ago.

"After you told me goodbye, our first goodbye, I felt like I'd missed something, like there was something you weren't telling me. You were all I could think about for a few days, until the big confrontation with Tanya."

"And then I realized what she'd done," he says.

"And then I started calling the heck out of your cell phone," he says.

I squint one eye open at him apologetically.

"I kinda sorta mighta have dropped my cell phone into the ocean."

He laughs a small, mirthless laugh. This is not your mirth type of situation.

"I figured as much. When was that?"

"On the ferry trip to Forks. The day after our final conversation."

He hums. "I'm still not clear on why you moved home to Forks."

"And I'm still not clear on how you managed to find me in Forks." It was clearly a challenge; he hadn't finished his half of the story yet.

"It wasn't easy," he says, almost apologetically. "Hence the three-month hiatus."

He tells me about how he tried every possible means to contact me after the phone had failed. He went to post a message on B'Elanna Torres' Facebook wall, only to find that she no longer existed. He sent out friend requests to an umpteen number of Bellas living in Seattle.

"I kinda sorta might have deleted my Facebook accounts," I say. "Both of them."

He'd figured as much. Finally, he remembered me saying something that could have meant my father is a cop. It just so happens that his brother, Emmett, is also a cop. Edward asked Emmett to run a search for Washington cops with a daughter named Bella.

It was a long shot.

But, for once, the long shot hit its target.

Edward tells me that, nearly three months after our last phone conversation, he received a phone call from Emmett with the name and address of a Charlie Swan.

"The next day—today—I showed up on your doorstep. I was about to knock when I was greeted by the most beautiful creature that I have ever seen."

Edward is looking at me, and, as always, he makes me feel beautiful.

"And now here I am, sitting in front of the girl I love, telling her my sad story in the hopes that she will forgive me at last."

We stare at each other some more.

"Your turn," he whispers, his voice cracking a little.

"My side of the story is stupid," I say. "Tanya told me she was having your baby, I didn't go to the coffee shop, the end."

My heart is racing; I'm not sure I can talk about this.

As always, Edward is patient.

"That little synopsis doesn't explain why I found you in Forks."

"No."

As always, Edward asks just the right questions to get me talking.

I tell him the unabridged version of my story. I tell him exactly what Tanya said to me on the phone. I tell him exactly how she said it and what mental images I'd conjured up as she said it.

I tell him about how I broke up with Mike for him. How I'd given up my friends, my job, and my life, for him.

Edward looks stricken.

I tell him that I was fine with having given up all those things because, well, I would have _him_.

But then I didn't have him.

"And I'm sitting in this god-forsaken hotel room," I say.

"And I'm crying," I say.

As I'm crying now.

This is a great story I'm telling. Replete with visual aids and everything.

For the first time, Edward is close enough to wipe away my tears.

The story ends, and Edward and I breathe out cleansing breaths of air. We'd gotten everything off our chests. I feel a hundred pounds lighter. From the looks of things, I'd say he feels the same way.

"What do we do now?" he asks.

Good question.

I think it would probably be best if we take this slow.

But I say, "Wanna see my room?"

He laughs. "More than anything in the world. I want to see everything that you would show me, Bella Swan. I want to know everything about you."

I feel the exact same way.


	10. Chapter 10

**-| Sold, Sight Unseen, **_continued_** |-**

* * *

Edward drives me back to civilization, to hearth, to home.

As we drive, we're blatantly staring at each other. Well, I'm blatantly staring at Edward. He sneaks constant glances at me while trying his best not to crash us into trees. We're staring because it's such a privilege to actually get to _see_ the other person for a change. I stare at Edward's broad shoulders, his wrists, the crook in his nose, and his rather sloppy sideburn.

He glances at my face, my neck, my feet.

I'm gratified that he doesn't glance at my chest.

Edward is such a gentleman.

In my room, he eyes a picture of me and Mike. If I could have predicted that Edward would be stopping by for a visit, I would have exorcised the space. There are all kinds of embarrassing pictures of me in here. Not to mention the dirty underwear lying about.

But Edward is focused on the one picture. "I thought he'd be taller."

"Nah, he's your typical roly poly kind of man."

Edward steps closer and shows me a picture of him and Tanya that he keeps in his wallet.

"I thought she'd be blonde."

"She is, actually. A strawberry blonde. But I told her once, a long time ago when we first met, that I preferred brunettes. She went to the salon the next day."

Huh.

We'd never discussed Edward's physical preferences. Would have gotten too close to breaking the rules. I stare down at the picture of Edward, the only one I've ever seen.

I like seeing him in real life better.

"Just so happens, I'm a brunette," I say.

"Believe me, I've noticed."

Edward tucks the picture back into his wallet, but he stays leaning in, as if he's still showing me the picture.

He says, "I'd like to do one thing."

His warm breath tickles my ear.

He says, "One thing I've wanted to do since the first moment I spoke to you. And certainly since the first moment I saw you."

His warm breath is making my head spin.

In a good way.

I blush.

"God," he whispers. "You don't know how good it is to be able to see you do that. I wondered if you were a blusher."

He traces my cheek lightly with a finger, which enflames me all the more.

"Yeah, I'm a blusher." I can't quite meet his eyes. His beautiful green eyes.

If I look into them now, I'll probably explode.

In a good way.

"Me too, actually."

Now I do look up, startled, to see that he's right—his cheeks look like two shiny red apples.

I had always wondered if he was a blusher.

I'm so glad he is. It makes him seem more human. If he didn't blush, you might confuse him for a porcelain statue of a god.

Him blushing, it takes my breath away.

It makes me feel like I can affect him, this beautiful, wonderful god.

He's staring at me like he knows exactly how I feel.

But if he thinks I'm a goddess, we're going to have to have a very serious heart-to-heart about his eyesight.

For now, I get up on my tippy toes. I put my right hand on his broad left shoulder and my left hand on his right. I lean up to him, very close, and press the faintest of kisses against the blush on first his left cheek, then his right.

I pull back, ever so slightly, until our noses are touching. Gently, I nudge his right nostril with my left, and his left nostril with my right.

His eyes, those beautiful green eyes, are looking right into mine, and they're wanting and needing and about to take.

I simultaneously explode and melt.

In a good way.

"Can I please kiss you now?" he says, and I've never heard this rough tone in his voice before. That's probably because he's never been about to kiss me before.

Edward is about to kiss me.

And then Edward is kissing me.

He's kissing me, and in between kisses, he's saying things to me. It takes me a while before I can understand the words, any words. It takes me a while because every nerve ending in my body is on fire. I think I'm about to pass out.

In a good way.

"I just turned 30," he's saying.

His lips discover the exposed skin of my neck.

"I was born in Chicago," he says.

His lips suck at my earlobe.

"I'm in banking," he says.

His lips meld against mine like they were made for me.

"And I love you," he says.

His lips show me how much.

His warm, strong arms are the only things holding me upright. Then he detaches his lips and leans his forehead down until it's touching mine.

"Your turn," he whispers into my parted mouth, and he's right. It's my turn to break all our rules. I start with a bang, leaning forward and running my tongue along his upper teeth, which taste ever so faintly like mint and cinnamon. My tongue snags slightly on one of his teeth, and I explore this anomaly for a moment.

I feel his knees go weak, and it's my turn to hold him up.

"I'll be 29 in September," I say.

My lips suck at his errant tooth.

"I was born in Forks," I say.

My lips explore his ridiculous expanse of jaw.

"I'm in marketing," I say.

My lips taste the skin of his neck.

"And I love you," I say.

My lips, my hands, and my whole body show him how much.

For a long, long time.

Pretty much up until the point where I hear the slam of Charlie's car door. Edward hears it, too, and we both freeze.

By this point, we have migrated to the bed. We look around, dazed, and see that his shirt is off, my shirt and jeans are half unbuttoned, and he's missing one shoe and one sock. On the same foot, thankfully. I stare at his delicate arch, which he's flexing nervously.

Should it bother me that his feet are prettier than mine?

"Bella?" Charlie calls out. "Whose car is this in the driveway?"

In our haste to get out of bed, we trip over each other and fall to the floor.

Edward mock-snaps his fingers in the gesture for _aw, shucks_.

"Bella?" Charlie calls again, and I know that he's standing at the foot of the stairs, peering up. He's probably wondering why I'm spasming all over the floor in my bedroom.

"Yeah dad. It's Edward's car."

As if that will explain everything.

"Edward who?"

"Edward Cullen," I say, smiling proudly at Edward. I'm proud because, if Charlie had asked me yesterday, I wouldn't have known.

I would have just told him that Edward's last name was Cludle (a.k.a. rhymes with noodle).

"Who the heck is Edward Cullen?"

Edward and I giggle at each other.

"I take it you didn't tell the fam about me," he whispers as he scrabbles around on the floor looking for his missing sock.

"Did you tell the fam about me?" I counter as I button up my jeans.

"Touché," he says, pulling his errant sock from under the bed.

As I stare at Edward's delectable derriere, I yell down to Charlie, "I'll be down in a second to introduce Edward."

Of course Edward's rear is great; as a child, he was clearly hit with the pretty stick. Heck, the pretty stick apparently frisked his every orifice.

Is it weird that I'm jealous of the pretty stick?

Charlie grumbles something I can't quite hear, and then I do hear his boots clomping off to his bedroom. Hopefully he'll be changed out of the uniform when Edward first sees him. I know how intimidating Charlie can be in his uniform.

Before we head downstairs, we look each other over carefully to ensure that all buttons are fastened and all shirts are on outside out and that no material is sticking oddly out of zippers. I notice that Edward's sock is on inside out, but I doubt Charlie will. Unlike me, most people don't stare at feet.

We give each other the thumbs-up.

I take one last look in my dresser mirror, just to be sure.

And then I do a double-take.

"You gave a thumbs up to this?" I hiss, frantically trying to smooth down my hair from where Edward might have gotten a little overzealous in running his hands through it. There wasn't much I could do about my red cheeks or overly bright eyes, though.

"Sorry, I guess I was distracted by your breasts and forgot to look higher."

He doesn't look sorry.

I double-check his hair and decide that it doesn't look any more sexed-up than it had when he'd first arrived. Something tells me his hair is just kinda like that.

And I kinda like that hair. A lot.

I grab Edward's hand and pull him down the stairs.

When we arrive, I drop his hand, and we stand awkwardly in the living room while waiting for Charlie to emerge from his den.

I'm more nervous than Edward is, and that's weird because Edward is the one who's about to meet his girlfriend's dad for the first time. Maybe he's not nervous because he hasn't yet seen Charlie's gun.

That's because it's hanging on the wall behind him. I notice that it's pointing straight at Edward's bed head.

When Charlie at last enters the room, dressed thankfully in unassuming plaid, Edward wastes no time in stepping forward and introducing himself.

"I'm Edward Cullen," he says, gripping Charlie's hand, "and I'd like to marry your daughter."

My heart stops, and I just look at Charlie.

"Hi, Edward," Charlie dryly acknowledges the first part of Edward's sentence, and then looks at me.

"You're smiling again," he says, and I so totally am. I'm standing here with a smile on my face so big that I'm afraid the weight of it is going to face-plant me.

It's been one of those days.

You know, one of those days in which the love of your life who you thought you'd lost forever because of his Saint Mary of a pregnant girlfriend comes back into your life and tells you that his girlfriend is actually a backstabbing witch—and a liar and slut, to boot—and then said soul mate kisses you senseless while simultaneously telling you for the first time how old he is, what he does for a living, and where he was born.

Yeah.

One of _those_ days.

"You're smiling," Charlie says to me, "and you were smiling earlier. Do both of those smiles have something to do with this Edward here?"

"They do. They absolutely do."

Charlie turns back to Edward. "Then you have my blessing. Any man who can make my daughter smile like that is a man I want in my daughter's life."

"Thank you sir," Edward says, but he's looking at me.

His eyes, they're saying, _Will you marry me?_

And my eyes, they're answering, _Yes yes yes for the love of God yes._

Within six months, we're married. Apparently, we'd both had enough of the whole long-term cohabitation thing. It helps that we both know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the other is "the one."

We spend the months before the wedding getting to know each other better, matching our respective physical mannerisms to our vocal ones. Memorizing what we each look like when we're laughing, when we're frowning, when we are expressing the myriad of emotions that we've only ever heard the other express.

Edward tells me that, if he'd seen me first before we talked, he would have been way too intimidated to ever go for me.

I snort. "Then it's a good thing you randomly starting dialing phone numbers one Thursday night."

"Just one number," he says. "The only number that mattered."

I frown. "You only dialed one number?"

"Yes." Edward shifts his position on my bed so he can look into my face. We're cuddling. We make good use of my bed when Charlie isn't home.

"Do you know what the odds are of you finding your soul mate from dialing one phone number?"

"I'm a banker, not a calculator," he says.

"But, if I had to guess," he says, "I would say that the odds are approximately 3,720 to one."

I narrow my eyes at him.

"That's a quote from Star Wars, isn't it?"

He nods and smiles at me, delighted.

Edward is such a geek for knowing that quote word-for-word.

And I'm such a geek for recognizing it.

Later, I get the _real_ story behind his alter ego, Andrew Cludel.

"I get the Andrew," I say. "But I don't understand the Cludel."

He smiles sneakily.

"It's actually the letters of my name all mixed around."

I blink.

Holy crow, Edward is Lord Voldemort.

Well, I'm close. He'd pulled a Voldemort, at least.

Rearranged, the letters of Andrew Cludel spell Edward Cullen.

Edward is such a geek.

But he's my geek.

Over the next six months, I find out everything about Edward (and Andrew) that I possibly can. I meet his two siblings (Alice and Emmett), his parents (Carlisle and Esme), and his best friend (Jasper).

When we're introduced, Jasper kisses my hand and winks. I assume it's because Edward told him that I think his Facebook picture is hot.

Over the next six months, I ask Edward any and every question, and he asks me his own in return. There are no rules, not anymore, and this is what freedom feels like.

This is what love feels like.

One month from our wedding, Edward says, "What do you think about me buying the Masen house?"

I almost can't think because I like the idea so much.

"Yes, please."

I think about all the days we can spend pouring our life and love into that beautiful old house. I think about the nights we can spend continuing getting to know each other—both mentally and physically.

We get married, and we do just that.

Edward gives me a lot of foot massages.

And we do…other things.

Sometimes, I accidentally call out "Drew!" when Edward makes me come.

And then I'm embarrassed, but Edward is like, "Don't be. I think it's sexy that you're in love with the both of me. The real Edward and my alter-ego Andrew. It's like I'm Superman, in a love triangle with myself."

And his mind boggles at his own geeky awesomeness and I just laugh and pull him down into yet another heated kiss.

Edward is my hero a thousand times over, so I'm perfectly fine with him thinking he's Superman. I'm perfectly happy to be his sassy Lois Lane.

Eventually, I think that I know everything about Edward, but I don't. Not yet. I can't possibly have learned all there is to learn about this gloriously beautiful, kind, considerate man I get the privilege of calling my husband. But I have the rest of our lives to learn everything there is to know about Edward Cullen—one detail, one gesture, one smile at a time.

Somehow, we'd found our happily ever after after all, and it started with a simple phone call to a stranger.

You may think that we'd been very, very lucky, but I no longer believe in luck.

I believe in love.

* * *

Fin | The End | Siyonara


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